Participants who took part in the 10th annual Peninsula Paddle were left stunned at the amount of plastic that is suffocating a section of the Black River.

Each year the Peninsula Paddle brings together individuals from all over the Mother City.

The Peninsula Paddle was started in 2010 to highlight the state of the canals, rivers and lakes between Muizenberg and Woodstock. 

Since then the City of Cape Town and the Invasive Species Unit made great strides in tackling solid waste and alien water weeds.

During the event, participants reached a section of the Black River where they were forced to a standstill by the sheer volumes of plastic in the water.

“Shocked to find a stretch of the Black River that was a sea of plastics and weeds. Such a disappointment. We couldn’t paddle for a large section of the river,” Kevin Winter, one of the paddle’s founders and participants told News24.

“The other place for us that was really bad was in the Steenberg canal. I don’t think we’ve ever seen it as bad as that – just whole islands of rubbish that we were paddling through, or walking through, because we couldn’t paddle.”

Winter is an environmental scientist at the University of Cape Town and a water expert at the university’s Future Water Institute.

He warned that the pollution would find its way into Table Bay with the next rainfall unless something was done about it. 

“And when it goes out to sea and we think we’ve lost it altogether, we need to think again… if we pollute our oceans… how are we expected to run desalination plants? How are we expected to create water from polluted water into drinking water? It’s insane.”

Winter said he hoped highlighting the deterioration would be a wake-up call, not only to the city, but to residents who discard pollutants into the rivers.