By Project Sunwave Team
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115kg Later: Lambert's Bay Shows Up for International Coastal Cleanup Day 2026
A Morning on the Sand
Saturday, 19 September, Project Sunwave hit the coast for our biggest cleanup of the year. As part of International Coastal Cleanup Day 2026, kids from across Lambert's Bay met at The Reef at 9am, split into groups, and worked three stretches of coastline: The Reef towards the Red Lighthouse, Malkopbaai towards Muisbosskerm, and The Reef towards Doorspring.
By the time the bags came in and got weighed, the total came to 115kg, off our beaches and out of the ocean.
What the Number Doesn't Show
115kg looks good on a poster, but it doesn't capture the kid who dug through a clump of kelp just to see what was hiding under it and definitely doesn't capture the girl standing at our Ocean Detective board, checking a feather she'd found against the picture of a Cape Gannet.
Every group spent their walk doing two things at once. Clearing what didn't belong, and paying attention to what did. The shells, the seaweed, the birds working the shoreline. Curiosity was as much the point as cleanup, and judging by how many kids came back with a story about something they found rather than just how full their bag was, that part landed.
What Saturday Actually Looked Like
Look through the photos from the day and you won't find posed group shots or a neat single-file line of volunteers. You'll find a coach checking a full bag with kids he's coached for years. A teenager and a nine-year-old filling the same bag between them. A mentor kneeling down to help a kid work out whether something was a shell or just a rock.
Thank You
None of Saturday would have looked the way it did without help from outside our own team. Thank you to Danne Joubert and the Cederberg Municipality for the snacks that kept small hands (and bigger ones) going all morning, and to the Western Cape Government for donating the notebooks and clean-up bags every group worked with. Small contributions, but they're exactly the kind that make a morning like this run.
Part of Something Bigger
Saturday's cleanup fed into the same International Coastal Cleanup Day push that had communities across South Africa, and around the world, out on their own coastlines that same day. 115kg from three stretches of Lambert's Bay beach is now part of a much bigger, global picture of what people are willing to do for their oceans and for a small coastal town, that's something.
See You Next Time
To every coach, mentor, parent, and kid who picked up a bag on Saturday: thank you. This is what Project Sunwave is actually about, not one isolated cleanup, but building a community that keeps choosing to do this, together, kilo by kilo, beach by beach.
The ocean connects us. Let's keep caring for it.
