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Litter at the Joburg Zoo has a new foe - the Kanosaurus, which eats and squashes metal cans for recycling.
A GIANT green dinosaur-like monster squats on the lush lawn at Joburg Zoo, its bright red mouth gaping wide, drawing the attention of visitors, most of whom are schoolchildren who stand either in awe or bewilderment at its sight.
The machine helps to remove recyclable waste from the general waste stream
A closer inspection reveals the monster to be the Kanosaurus - a recycling machine designed to squash cans.
The Kanosaurus was let loose at the zoo on Friday, 9 October by the member of the mayoral committee for environment and corporate and shared services, Matshidiso Mfikoe, and the president of the Johannesburg Rotary Club, Jalda Hodges.
It was donated to the zoo by the Rotary Club following a string of complaints from the club's past president, Ivan Allan, that litter was a problem at the zoo after each weekend of festivities. The Kanosaurus swallows cans through its mouth and then squashes them before spitting them out the back. This makes it easy for the zoo to consolidate cans and deliver them to recycling companies or the original manufacturers.
Kanosaurus is a combination of the words "can" and "dinosaur". Unveiling the "monster", which had been wrapped in a murky cloth for most of Friday morning, Hodges said the machine would help remove recyclable waste from the general waste stream.
It stands 1,8 metres tall and is 1,6 metres wide.
"The primary motivation for recycling for everybody is that it is the right thing to do, it is good for the environment, and it is necessary for our children and their children."
She noted that the monster had been designed to be environmentally friendly and to have a negative carbon footprint. "Many of our resources today are scare and they continue to become [scarcer]. We cannot continue to be a society that just buys the new and disposes of the old in the hope that we can bury it.
"We need to find some way of accessing items before they get to landfill sites, and recycle them so that we can reuse them," Hodges said.
Rotary Club was looking for sponsors to build additional waste eaters.
The Kanosaurus's mechanism was designed by John Benfield, a Rotarian and engineer, and its shape was designed by Rocco, an artist and specialist in fibreglass moulds. It was sponsored by the Rotary Club, a not for profit organisation that helps local communities with food, water and sanitation, literacy, and environmental education.
Mfikoe referred to the monster as a "toy" that would help the zoo deal more effectively with littering problems. It would also be educational.
"The zoo has a littering problem," said Louise Gordon, its executive manager for marketing and education. "A large number of children come to the zoo [and] bring their own food ... but this contributes to the litter in the zoo."
She pointed out that the Kanosaurus would help teach schoolchildren about conservation of natural resources and would help to make recycling fun for the children.
"Recycling is a cost-saving measure that can, in the long run, become cheaper and help save a lot of natural resources like water," said Gordon.
Recycling is a way of stopping the disposal of useful material as waste. It helps to reduce air, land and water pollution, and carbon emissions; and it cuts the need for vast landfills. Recyclable materials include glass, paper, metal, plastic, textiles and electronics, which can be sorted, cleaned, and reprocessed into new materials.
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