WATCH: Volunteers collected 40 tonnes of trash off remote Vancouver Island beaches over the past seven months. Monica Martinez reports.
Bags upon bags of garbage sits on the ground in Delta, but it’s not household trash, it’s marine debris collected from the shores of Vancouver Island’s west coast.
For the past seven months, volunteers have been collecting debris from remote beaches, and stuffing it into bags.
Heavy duty helicopters swooped in and piled the trash onto the barge, 40 tonnes in total, making this the largest marine cleanup in Canadian history.
“It’s hugely satisfying to look at this pile. It’s worrisome that this is just scratching the surface of what we observed out there,” said Rob O’Dea, manager with the Living Oceans Society, a marine conservation group overseeing the cleanup efforts.
Styrofoam, plastics and fishing boats are the most common items.
The U.S. scientific agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates about 1.4 billion pounds of plastic goes into the world’s oceans every year.
That causes the annual death of one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals.
“Once it gets on the beach it incorporates itself in the food chain – salmon, herring, juvenile fish are up in the kelp beds. This material as it breaks down becomes a food source for them,” O’Dea said.
Marine conservationists said people can help by refusing single use disposable plastics.
“They are a relatively recent innovation in human culture and we got along just fine without them and we have to stop using them,” said Living Oceans Executive Director Karen Wristen.
The operation is funded largely by the $1-million the Japanese government gave Canada for shoreline cleanup after the 2011 tsunami.
A big chunk of what’s here is from Japan.
“Judging by our cleanup on the north island about 1/3 was of Japanese origin whether from the tsunami or not I can’t say but from Japan from sure,” she said.
Now, the trash needs to be sorted for recycling and repurposing, an activity the public is encouraged to get involved in this weekend in Delta.
It’s a small dent in a massive problem, but this cleanup will go a long way in helping conserve marine life on Vancouver Island’s west coast.
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