How to De-junk the Coast

On a sunny day in late August, my friend Gillian picks me up just before 8 a.m., and we head north on the Sunshine Coast’s Highway 101.

Gillian and I swim together in a local open-water swimming group. We were on the beach, about to wade at one of our normal spots, when she invited me along to a day of marine debris cleanup. It felt fitting. How could I say no?

We arrive at Finn Bay, in Lund, after the first crew has already set off for the day. They’re out bright and early to pick up a large load of Styrofoam blocks from a farther-flung part of the region.

This is the seventh year that local waste solutions outfit Let’s Talk Trash has done marine debris cleanups along the northern Sunshine Coast and nearby Gulf and Discovery islands. From Aug. 13 into late September, they visit Nelson Island, Ahgykson, Cortes, Read, Quadra and Marina, among others.

The goal is to gather debris — whatever has washed up onshore and been collected by volunteers — and sort it to divert or recycle as much of it as possible. The work of diversion and recycling will be done by Ocean Legacy, a non-profit founded in 2013 to end ocean plastic waste.

“They’re the only facility in Canada — in North America, really — that takes marine debris to recycle,” Abby McLennan, an environmental consultant with Let’s Talk Trash, tells me later over a Zoom call.

Today, crew lead Océanne Bourque says, we’ll be boating over to Hernando Island to get a relatively large load of marine debris, and then to Savary Island, for a much smaller one.

Our group consists of Matt, the captain; Bourque, the crew lead; Gillian and Connor, the crew; and Silas, a middle-schooler who’s volunteering on the cleanup today.

As we set out, Silas shows us a few sea urchins he scooped from the shallows.

It’s low tide when we reach Hernando.

Residents decide that, rather than having us trudge across wet, soupy sand on the beach, they’ll drive the small mountain of ocean debris they’ve collected over to the dock by pickup truck and golf cart.

It takes us about three hours to sort through detritus on Hernando. Today’s haul includes oyster baskets, nets, rope, flip-flops, shoes (thankfully, no feet), a soccer ball, floats and buoys, glass and plastic bottles, a tall Starbucks cold drink container, a child’s broken beach bucket, a car bumper and a fire hose — everything people accidentally lose to the ocean or hope the ocean will hold amongst its secrets.

Styrofoam and Styrofoam-filled tires are amongst the most common items found during cleanups in the Salish Sea. Styrofoam’s buoyancy makes it useful for docks.

The problem is, when polystyrene breaks down, it has deleterious effects on marine life, ocean health and human health.

Let’s Talk Trash and other ocean cleanup groups try to seek it out and remove it before it breaks down into nurdles — tiny plastic pellets that can cause massive ecological damage.

The crew sorts the debris into super sacks, which Bourque tags with the material type, location and group name — “LTT” for Let’s Talk Trash.

Some items are diverted from the landfill right here in qathet via a free group on Facebook. People love to use the oyster baskets to store their harvested garlic, for example, Bourque says. Barrels are also in high demand.

When everything is finally sorted and the boat is full, we break for lunch and take a swim off the dock, which is covered, underwater, in anemones.

And then it’s time to head back to Finn Bay from Hernando. We pile on top of the super sacks of debris, arranging ourselves like hauled-out sea lions.

After unloading, we head back out to Savary Island.

Catherine Ostler greets us, wearing a T-shirt that reads, “Keep Savary Clean.” Ostler, a retired English teacher, is the education co-ordinator for Fishing for Plastic, a global organization dedicated to encouraging people to combat plastic pollution in their communities.

“This is just what we’ve collected passively from the trailheads this summer,” Ostler says. People will collect debris and garbage while they’re hiking, or on the beach, Ostler says, and leave it at the trailheads for pickup later.

This pile is small, she says, in part because they filled six super sacks with marine debris a few months ago during their annual cleanup in May.

After the Savary pickup, another quick swim. This time, out in the deep and unphotographed — I tucked my phone away and dove in too quickly, forgetting my role as a reporter in favour of immersing myself and cooling down.

Bourque grew up on the East Coast and started working with the cleanup crew four years ago, when Let’s Talk Trash received Clean Coast, Clean Waters funding from the provincial government. The money bolstered their cleanup efforts and enabled them to hire staff for the cleanup crews.

“My dad was a diving instructor,” she says. “I’ve always been diving.”

The ocean, she says, is her workplace. It’s a passion of hers to share it with others. Her work with Let’s Talk Trash offers an opportunity to do that.

And sometimes participating in the cleanups can change people’s behaviour. After seeing the sheer number of plastic water bottles that accumulate, for example, some crew and volunteers swear off buying them in the future.

When we get back to Finn Bay from Savary, we unload our second haul.

After it’s sorted and tagged, the super sacks and tires and oversized odds and ends go into a large industrial bin. The bins, once full, will be taken from Finn Bay to the qathet Ocean Plastic Depot 33 kilometres south.

Foam blocks, collected by another team today, are lifted and secured onto a flatbed truck. They’ll be taken down to the depot, too.

From there, the debris will be weighed, put into shipping containers and barged down to Ocean Legacy’s Plastic Pollution Emergency Response Facility in Richmond.

Let’s Talk Trash hasn’t yet tallied the total amount of marine debris they’ve collected from the region this year.

They’ve got a couple more days of regular pickup scheduled, and two trips to pick up large objects that need to happen at high tide.

In 2017, the organization began by administering the qathet Regional District’s annual shoreline cleanup. That year, everything they collected went to the landfill. And then they learned about Ocean Legacy.

Before receiving funding from Clean Coast, Clean Waters, McLennan estimates that they were able to collect about 4,000 kilograms of marine debris a year off qathet’s shores.

After they received funding, that scaled dramatically. Last year, for example, they collected 47,689 kilograms of material, McLennan says. Almost 38,734 kilograms of that was diverted or recycled.

And in 2022 — what McLennan refers to as the infamous “tire island” year, when the group collected 2,409 tires off an islet next door to Nelson Island — they collected 98,835 kilograms of material, keeping about 54,343 kilograms from the landfill.

Ocean Legacy has worked tenaciously over the years to accept materials other recyclers have found too difficult and cumbersome, McLennan says.

With Tire Stewardship BC’s support, for example, they purchased a tire guillotine, which quickly and efficiently separates tires from their Styrofoam centres. Tire Stewardship BC donates to Ocean Legacy annually to support this work; it also recycles the tires after Ocean Legacy has processed them.

Ocean Legacy recycles plastics from ropes, nets and other debris into pellets, which can then be repurposed into new objects, such as a plastic lumber, McLennan says. They are particular about who they work with, she adds. The goal is to create a circular economy and make sure the new objects don’t re-enter the waste stream quickly.

And they work with a company that repurposes some of the Styrofoam into new floats, encased in hard plastic so that they do not pollute or break down into the ecosystem. What can’t be repurposed this way is used by Lafarge at its cement manufacturing plant in Richmond, McLennan says — it’s incinerated for fuel, as an alternative to coal.

The cleanup work can, occasionally, be depressing. It’s tough to see how much pollution there is, and how it impacts marine life.

But crew members also tell me that even when it’s hard, it feels better to do something than nothing.

“We have only one ocean,” Bourque says. “We have to take care of it.”