A community's fight against water contamination in Matatiele

Watching Tukulo Mtshayelo amble through the veld, it seems he’d rather spend his Fridays cleaning up the ’hood instead of cruising a shopping mall like many his age. The lanky 25-year-old — “TK” to most — crunches through ankle-high grass left crisp as parchment by autumn’s cooler mood. 

Mtshayelo makes his way through the outskirts of his village — about an hour’s drive from Matatiele in the Eastern Cape — to visit a spring, one of three natural sources that they draw on for home use and to water their livestock. 

The object of his pride: a brick-and-cement structure that the community sank into the stream bed a few metres downhill from the spring’s eye. Now it’s protected from the cattle’s trampling hooves or villagers hauling their water containers in and out of the collection point. Instead, people can simply open the tap at the front of the cistern and catch the clear, sweet liquid. 

It wasn’t always like this, Mtshayelo says. A few years ago, the stream was smothered by a thicket of wattle trees so dense that you couldn’t see from one side of the glen to the other. The rivulet choked. People couldn’t collect much more than 20 litres of water in a day.

It took some brute force to clear the trees, but Mtshayelo managed to recruit some youngsters to do the heavy lifting. Now they get 200 litres a day, easily, he reckons. 

A few forms of pollution threaten the veld, water supply and people’s health in these shared farmlands, and some in the community are doing what they can to mop it up. They’re clearing thirsty invasive trees, a form of biological pollution. They’re tackling the scourge of single-use nappies that are thrown into the veld, which cattle inadvertently eat and which drives a tapeworm cycle that withers families’ herds further.

[Read about the Indigenous farmers in rural Matatiele are addressing nappy pollution in Piles of Sh*t part 1, part 2, and part 3.]

But when Mtshayelo opens the faucet to show how ample its flow is, the liquid — gilded in the midmorning light — hides another form of pollution that the community has yet to contend with.

A study is just kicking off in rural Matatiele to see how much the discarded single-use nappies, thrown into the veld because there’s no waste collection here, might be contributing locally to microplastic pollution in communal grazing lands and streams. 

But while this work ticks over in the background, new research shows that microplastic pollution is already settling widely over the region. 

There’s evidence from high-altitude wetlands in the water factories of the Lesotho and Drakensberg catchments that show that microplastics — the torn-apart shards of these indestructible materials — aren’t coming from local communities’ poorly managed waste. It’s coming from the sky. 

Microplastics pollution is being swept in on air currents across distances so far that it’s hard to track the source. 

Global North studies have already established definitively that we are taking in microplastics through drinking, eating and breathing, and that the particles are washing up in our organs, arteries and brains like an oil spill clogging a pristine beach.

Now, here in the understudied Global South and in one of the most important water catchments for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), it appears that microplastics are polluting the headwaters of the Orange-Senqu River Basin. This novel form of pollution may be to the region what acid rain was to Europe and North America in the 1980s. 

Out of sight, out of mind 

Where do disposable nappies go to die?

These nappies don’t die. They just break down into smaller and smaller parts until they’re invisible to the naked eye, and out of sight usually means out of mind. 

What does this mean for the roughly 3.1 tons of filthy nappies that are thrown out in household waste across the Madlangala district in the Eastern Cape each year, when the municipality can’t collect most of it and families are forced to throw it into the veld and hope that nature will take its course? 

Master’s student Simon Haimann hopes to answer this question. Later this year, in a research collaboration between the University of the Western Cape’s Biodiversity and Conservation Biology Department where he’s based and the Agricultural Research Council, Haimann will begin collecting water samples from sites in the area to look for traces of microplastics. If they’re there, he’ll see if they link back to locally discarded nappies. 

“(Farmers) are talking about the cattle eating the plastic. They haven’t talked about them drinking it,” Haimann says. 

Since families are often drinking from the same water sources as their animals, both will be ingesting these particles if they’re in the water.

Until now, the fallout of nappy pollution here has been fairly easy to see, if you know what to look for. 

There’s the obvious, like the balled-up wads of sodden, discarded nappies in the veld that are in various states of breaking apart through wear and tear by the elements. Local development agency Environmental and Rural Solutions (ERS) is working with communities and young community leaders like Mtshayelo to resolve the nappy problem, and has mapped some of the hotspots. 

Then there are the less obvious signs of pollution, like the jutting hipbones of a wasting cow whose rumen is snarled up with nappy remnants that it’s inadvertently eaten. Another sign is one that only an abattoir worker will pick up when processing a carcass: the white pimple-like pox, known in the trade as “meat measles”, that forms between the muscle and hide of a cow with a tapeworm infection. This is what happens when animals roam in veld where human faeces are lying about. 

Haimann’s work will help complete the picture, probably showing that even after the discarded plastic nappies seem to have disappeared, they’re still present in the environment. 

Haimann will collect water samples from five sites during the wet and dry seasons, and have them analysed back at the UWC Microplastic and Coastal Research (MCR) lab, to see if there are microplastics in the water. If so, the next question will be how much of that includes materials that are typically used to make plastic nappies: polyethylene and polyurethane. 

“Items that have plastics in them are composed of different polymers,” explains department head, associate professor Anusha Rajkaran. 

“Think of it as a recipe, and there’s different components in that recipe. In a nappy, you could expect to find polyethylene and polyurethane, (which) do different tasks such as prevent leakage, and keep the nappy attached to the infant,” she says. 

Once they’ve determined what polymers are in the samples, and in what concentrations, they can get an idea of the possible risks to people, animals or the environment, based on the known hazards associated with these materials. 

Haimann will also bring back to the lab a range of nappies available in shops in the Matatiele surrounds, and put them through a tumbling process that will break them down in a way that mimics how microplastics form out in the wild. Then he’ll compare these polymers with those in the water samples. 

At this stage, the research won’t try to work out how long the microplastics have been in the environment — five, 10, 20 years? — and the technology can’t be forensic enough to link the pollution back to a specific nappy brand. Nevertheless, it will fill a glaring gap in understanding the extent of land-based microplastics pollution in the region. Until now, most research has focused on ocean environments. 

“There aren’t a lot of studies looking at microplastics in the terrestrial environment,” says Haimann.

Blowing in the wind 

Dr Samuel Motitsoe expected to find microscopic plastic bits snagged in the filters of the steel sampling bucket designed to capture the surrounding air, after he left it out for 24 hours at a wetland in the Golden Gate National Park in the Free State Drakensberg.

“There’s a lot of human activity here — hiking, camping,” says the freshwater ecologist from Witwatersrand University’s School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences. “There’s also a provincial road that passes through the park.”

So close to human disturbance, and it’s likely there’ll be some plastic in the environment. 

He also wasn’t entirely surprised to find plastic fibres in similar air samples collected at a wetland in the Sehlabathebe National Park in Lesotho, a remote wilderness about 160km south of Golden Gate as the crow flies. The site is also 40km northeast of where Haimann and his team will do their sampling outside Matatiele, and where Mtshayelo’s community restored the village spring. 

Finding plastic shards and fibres in air samples at both protected areas confirms what environmental scientists have long suspected: tiny pollutants can blow in across great distances, and settle at sites hundreds of kilometres from the source of “spill”. 

Motitsoe has clocked up some kilometres in the past few years, travelling to upward of 100 mountainous sites in the Drakensberg and Lesotho to learn more about these alpine ecosystems. 

Mostly, his eye has been on finding plant or animal species that haven’t been identified by science yet. But he’s also interested in furthering research into the movement of pollution across the region. 

“(Earlier studies) looking at water chemistry in these high-altitude wetlands (show) that pollution can be spread through air,” he says. 

Heavy metals such as lead from places such as Gauteng and Mpumalanga, where there’s fossil fuel burning and mining, for instance, can get into the atmosphere and blow far across the subcontinent. 

“When it falls in wetlands and rivers, it gets concentrated in the water and sediments,” he explains. “We can pick up some of these heavy metals even from hundreds of kilometres away.”

It’s also well established that microplastic particles, particularly fibres, are easily airborne. 

Motitsoe decided to collect air and sediment samples at high-altitude wetlands in Lesotho and South Africa — specifically Golden Gate and Sehlabathebe because of their proximity to different levels of human activities — to see if there are traces of this new form of pollution. 

Unsurprisingly, the Golden Gate samples show plenty of plastic particles, particularly fibres. Their presence in the wetland’s muddy sediment shows they’ve been coming into the system for some time. Their presence in the atmospheric samples shows how they’re getting here: blown in on air currents. 

There wasn’t much plastic in the sediment samples from the Sehlabathebe site, but the fact that fibres turned up in the air samples at all shows that they’re now arriving even here, far from any obvious source of human disturbance, Motitsoe says. 

The ecologist’s next step is lab analysis, using the same technique that Haimann and Rajkaran will use on the Matatiele samples, which will show what kinds of polymers are most present. 

“From the (lab results), we can tell if it’s from secondary or primary plastic components,” he says. “If it’s primary, that’s your cosmetics, like skin or face wash, and makeup. If it’s secondary, that means it’s big plastics disintegrating and forming microplastics that then get deposited. We need to pinpoint what the majority contributor of the plastic is in these different systems.”

This is the first time researchers have looked for signs of microplastic pollution in this part of the continent. Given that it’s turned up in these samples, both Motitsoe and Rajkaran agree that we can extrapolate: airborne plastic particles are probably being deposited across much of the region, which includes the headwaters of the Orange-Senqu River Basin. This catchment feeds water to four SADC countries — South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia. Given the exponential growth of plastic production globally, most of which becomes waste, this will increase dramatically. 

Public health’s new terra incognita

Global North studies show that microplastics are turning up in many parts of the human body: from placental tissue, breast milk and newborn’s first stools, right through to the brain tissue of the recently deceased. It’s not surprising that they should turn up in our livers, according to Dr Stephanie Wright, associate professor of environmental toxicology at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London. The liver’s job is to filter gunk from the body, after all. 

But these particles are also turning up elsewhere in the body, including in blood, bone marrow, heart tissue, testes, and in the plaque lining people’s arteries. 

These particles have become so small that they’ve managed to bypass one of the body’s most sophisticated defences — the blood-brain barrier — which is allowing them to amass in human brain tissue. But the rate of accumulation in brain tissue has doubled in the past eight years, according to health sciences research from the University of New Mexico in the US. The same study shows that the concentration of plastics in the brains of people who died with dementia was 10 times higher than those with healthy brains. 

Professor Matthew Campen from the university’s College of Pharmacy says they can’t say at this stage if the plastic pollution caused the dementia symptoms, or if the disease itself allowed for the brain tissue to snag more plastic particles. 

The situation isn’t getting better. 

Of the 6,300 million metric tons of accumulated plastic waste that’s been produced globally in the past 70 years, 80% of that is either sitting in landfills or being milled down into tiny indestructible particles in the environment, according to number crunching by the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California.

The harms aren’t just from the physical presence of particles in the body, which could block arteries and cause strokes. Plastics also carry the chemicals added during manufacture — several thousand in all, added to various polymers — such as fire retardants, stabilisers and colour fixers. These leach out of the plastic over time, and many are already known to be cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting and gene-scrambling. 

To ease some of the public panic, Wright recently told the BBC that the early reading of plastics in human tissue is still a bit error-prone. Also, the level of toxicity from this pollution is, like most toxins, dose-dependent. Dose, in this case, depends is how much plastic is there, which polymers, their size and surface area, how hazardous these are, and how long they remain in the body. 

All things invisible 

At this stage, no one really knows what constitutes a dangerous or lethal dose of plastic pollution in the body. Much like Marie Curie, who inadvertently poisoned herself by carrying around in her lab coat pocket the very radioactive material whose discovery won her Nobel prizes for chemistry and physics, the evidence of plastic pollution harms needs to catch up with the laws of physics. These laws are already at play in people’s bodies, even if they haven’t been quantified yet. 

Out here in the rural Eastern Cape, it’s hard to know to what extent youngsters like Tukulo Mtshayelo are exposed to this new health hazard. There’s still no way to measure the buildup of plastic particles in someone’s brain while they’re alive. 

Haimann and Motitsoe’s measurements of the concentration of plastic particles in the water and soil of this understudied part of southern Africa will give a first glimpse into the likely pollution exposure and risk to people like Mtshayelo. And until global leaders agree to act decisively to throttle back on plastic production to stop the pollution at source, there isn’t much that the youth in Mtshayelo’s community can do to protect themselves, their bodies, and their brains. 

Mtshayelo is doing what he can, for now, to make things better in his ’hood. His smile is rakish — there’s a metallic flash from his front teeth — as he speaks eloquently from behind his shades about the volunteers whom he coaxed into joining the regular Friday morning bush clearing sessions. The promise of cool drinks and snacks probably helped rally his peers, he chuckles, and now they share the triumph of a communal spring that’s returned to a bucolic flow. DM

This story is from Story Ark – tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points, a multi-year mobile journalism project that’s investigating how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime. It is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, which supports investigative journalism. 

It is also part of the Covering Climate Now 89 Percent Project, a year-long global media collaboration aimed at highlighting the fact that the vast majority of people in the world care about climate change and want their governments to do something about it.