When Erik Blaney discovered what winter storms had washed up on the beaches of AhGyk Son (the Tla’Amin name for Harwood Island), he knew he needed some help.
So the Tla’Amin First Nation’s environmental stewardship coordinator teamed up with a Powell River-based group to start on the long job of getting rid of Styrofoam, plastics, metals and other debris on the beaches.
During two days in mid-March, Blaney led 20 volunteers organized by the Pebble in the Pond environmental society. The group collected more than a container load of rubbish, but Blaney still worries that the work was… well, just a pebble in a pond.
“There is still so much more left to do, and there is a lot we can’t physically get to because it is covered by so much driftwood,” said Blaney. “Also, we’re already out of money to pay for a barge to remove it all so we’ll have to find other funding to continue the cleanup. I am especially concerned about the Styrofoam which poses a choking hazard to the orcas in the area.”
Small pieces of Styrofoam, sometimes more than six inches deep, coat hundreds of feet of some beaches. Styrofoam is manufactured by Dow Chemical and is a polystyrene composed of the chemicals benzene and styrene.
In addition to many pieces of Styrofoam, volunteers removed an array of plastic garbage including more than 100 feet of nylon rope (most of the rope being unrecoverable because it was tangled up in driftwood), 74 tennis balls, 58 plastic bottles, 22 plastic jugs, 31 flip-flop sandals and much more.
In a posting on its blog, Pebble in the Pond said a fragile ecosystem was at risk:
“The southeast side of AhGyk Son (where the cleanup efforts were concentrated) is a Coastal Sand Dune ecosystem which is one of the ecosystems at risk in BC… These dune environments create unique habitats for plants.”
Over two afternoons, volunteers removed more than 1.5 metric tonnes of garbage including 1,459 pieces of expanded polystyrene from a 1 km stretch of beach.
