The beachcombers
The mandate of the Vancouver Aquarium is to “safeguard aquatic life through education, conservation, and direct action, like the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup,” says Carla Schuk, the program’s manager. She explains that the trash polluting our lakes and rivers poses a persistent threat to fish, birds and other wildlife. Animals become entangled in discarded fishing lines and plastic strapping; they choke on items mistaken for food. Garbage can block the sunlight that aquatic plants need to grow, and can serve as host for parasites, transporting invasive species from one water body to the next.
What You Can Do
You don’t have to wait for the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup to roll around each year to keep our shores litter free. There are simple things you can do every day to keep trash from invading our lakes and rivers.
1 Reuse plastic shopping bags or take your own canvas bags to the grocery store. Plastic bags are a major source of shoreline litter. Animals choke on them or become entangled in them, and they can block out the sunlight aquatic plants need to grow.
2 If you smoke, be sure to dispose of your cigarette butts in receptacles designed for that purpose. Cigarette butts take at least five years to biodegrade and can leach dangerous chemicals.
3 Carry empty drink cans and bottles with you until you come to a recycling bin where they can be properly disposed of. Glass can take up to a million years to break down on its own.
4 Clean up trash as you see it. If we all make a small effort every day, there will be much less work for the cleanup crews to do each September.
5 Change your attitude to Canada’s waterways. Lakes and rivers are not a dumping ground. The key to conserving marine environments is to make sure that garbage never winds up there in the first place.
Marine debris is, in fact, a huge global problem. In July 2007, the ICC reported that more than one million seabirds and a hundred thousand marine animals die each year because of garbage that is left along the world’s shorelines. Just a few months earlier, Greenpeace issued a report that revealed the presence of what it termed a “trash vortex” – also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch and the Asian Trash Trail – in the Pacific Ocean, just north of Hawaii. This swirling mass of waste – plastic bags and bottles, fishing nets, tires and foam – is about the size of Texas and has put at least 267 marine species at risk.
And then there are the dangers posed by chemicals that leach into the soil and water, or are released into the air. Cigarette butts, for instance, contain some 165 different toxins, including lead, arsenic and cadmium, all potentially deadly. Discarded electronics and computer equipment – “e-trash” – releases chromium, lead and mercury into our environment when not properly disposed of. In short, shoreline litter poses as great a danger to humans as it does to plants, fish and birds.
I quickly realized I had grossly underestimated the amount of junk along our “neat” little patch of shore. My team had filled the first garbage bag to overflowing within 20 minutes, even after separating out the recyclables. It soon became clear that it would be impossible for us to keep an accurate record of the amount of Styrofoam or the number of cigarette butts we picked up, and we resorted to writing “too much to count” on our data cards.
In the four hours we spent cleaning, cigarette butts were easily our most frequently collected item. But all those tiny bits and pieces of pink Styrofoam – I can’t even imagine where they came from – were a close second. Tampon applicators, plastic cup lids and coffee stirrers rounded out our top five. And we found some pretty strange items as well. I collected rosary beads, a child’s tiny orange doll clothes hanger and the bag for a laptop computer; other volunteers found an axe, a size 14 shoe (just the one) and a case for a pornographic DVD. We had scoffed a bit at our “sharps” container, convinced that we would never find syringes in a relatively remote area. But we took away at least eight needles and five fishing lures.
Elsewhere around the province, people were finding all sorts of bizarre items. Divers from the Toronto Police Marine Unit pulled an intact rickshaw from the muddy waters of the Toronto harbour. Lake Ontario also yielded a streetlamp and a message in a bottle, purportedly from Osama bin Laden. In Rainy River, on the Ontario-Minnesota border, volunteers found a boat made entirely of duct tape. And for reasons I can’t even begin to guess at, Ontario remains the national leader in discarded coconuts, with six.
Most of the people at our cleanup seemed to find the whole experience bittersweet. Everyone agreed that it was empowering to do something that had an instant, measurable impact on the environment. “You can see the results of your efforts right away,” remarked site coordinator McGroarty, pointing out that results are less tangible when you recycle or use public transit. But for my fellow club members in particular, it was a little depressing to realize how wrong we had been about the state of the land around our clubhouse. “I see this area all the time,” said Philpott, “and yet somehow I never noticed how bad it is.” Higgins agreed. “It was 10 times worse than I thought it would be,” she said. “People seem to be treating the lake like a garbage dump.”
All those tiny bits of broken glass and plastic have a way of sneaking into crevices between rocks or burying themselves in sand, and that makes them almost invisible until you really start looking. And then it is all you can see. Despite the four or five hours we spent working on our site, we all knew we’d barely made a dent in cleaning it. Which is why we’ll all be back out there again next September.
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Janice Weaver is a Toronto-based writer and editor.
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