This past Sunday, on June 1st, 2008, two men set sail from Long Beach, California heading towards Hawaii. That in itself is not unique or unusual, people sail across the Pacific Ocean all the time. What is unusual is that they are, more aptly going to drift on a raft to Hawaii. Four men did this in 1958 and arrived safe and sound on Kona Beach, but what is different this time around is that the raft these men are using are made out of… plastic bottles!

Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal are the two sailors aboard JUNK, a raft made out of recycled water bottles. Weighing at 1.5 tons, it is anticipated that JUNK will arrive in Hawaii in 6 weeks time with our intrepid travellers. Why are they doing this? To help raise awareness about litter in our oceans.

Here’s a video of a quick interview with these boys before they set off:

I look forward to hearing about their adventures and will be checking out JUNK, the blog that will be documenting their journey, over the next few weeks.

For other references and pieces on the Junk Raft and its inhabitants:

- A post on Discover Magazine’s blog, “Raft of Plastic Bottles Sets Sail for Hawaii”

- An article in the National Post, “A little more Junk in the water”

Of course, plastic is not the only item that doesn’t belong on shorelines and waterways that we find. Every year over the last 15 years during the Vancouver Aquarium’s week-long TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, some of the most common items removed are cigarette butts, food wrappers, and beverage cans. In 2007 alone, 87,489 kgs of litter was collected. For me, I don’t do measurements all that well, I don’t register how much things weigh in kilograms either. So, I can’t picture what this means. When I convert it to pounds 87,489 kgs becomes just over 192,880 lbs – the equivalent of 11,151.5 Canadians, a family of four beluga whales, nearly 22.5 hummers, 6 garbage trucks, or 28 elephants! That’s a lot of trash!

Help keep our environment clean by registering to be part of the 15th Annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. Once you’ve registered, choose to start a cleanup location or join one near you.

When I first sat down and started going through this mass of files that I have inherited from employees of the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup past, one note caught my attention and has stuck with me since. It was a brief message from the coordinator for one of our sites in White Rock, as they were cleaning up Mud Bay Shore, BC on September 22, 2001, they came across an item most unusual. A message in a bottle.

Actually, it wasn’t just a message in a bottle, but the ashes of one recently deceased resident of White Rock. The message that was included….

As any humanitarian would do, they scattered the ashes and then contacted this man’s son. His response follows:

So I would like to challenge people to write in about what has been the most interesting thing that they have found along the beaches and shorelines over the last 15 years. There are rumours that a house was found in a local creek. Other items found include shopping carts, dirt bikes, computers, lost art, an engagement ring, if you can name it, we’ve probably found it.

Like every year, I invite you to take up the opportunity to mine the shores of our oceans and waterways through Vancouver Aquarium’s TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, our 15th annual weeklong cleanup runs Saturday, September 20th through until Sunday, September 28th, in conjunction with the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. Find a location near you and claim it as your own, or join an existing cleanup.

PS: Just a quick update to let you, we’ve just joined Facebook, become a Fan of Vancouver Aquarium’s TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup.

Click here to find us:

Don’t forget to upload your photos to the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup Flickr Pool!

Last year for the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, over 87,000 kgs of litter was removed from our shoreline. From the few hours each group puts in to clean up their site during this one week in 2007, the majority of items collected were cigarette butts (270,756), food wrappers (106,139), plastic bags (79,646), caps/lids (55,050), and beverage cans (36,631). For this brief period of time during the third week in September a total of 376,294 cups, plates, forks, and knives were retrieved and 1,957,493 cigarette butts internationally.

On another note, a friend forwarded a project that Chris Jordan, an artist in Seattle has been working on. It is absolutely amazing and beautiful and is called “Running The Numbers: An American Self-Portrait.” Here’s one of his pieces “Plastic Cups, 2008.” It’s 60″ x 90″ and represents 1 million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.

Can’t quite see it? Here’s a closer look:

Still can’t quite see it?

Now to put things into perspective, remember how I mentioned that 1,957,493 cigarette butts were collected from shorelines and waterways around the world? This number translates to approximately 97,875 packs of cigarettes, just under half the number of cigarette boxes Jordan used to create a 72″ x 98″ art piece called “Skull With Cigarette, 2007,” based on a painting by Van Gogh.

And of course some a closer look.

Numbers are deceiving. And it isn’t until we can put it into context that suddenly it all comes together and starts to make sense. Along a similar vein, it is only through working together that we can make an impact and a difference to the environment around us. Help us keep our shorelines and waterways beautiful by joining or starting your own shoreline cleanup by registering to be part of the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup today.

This past weekend as I struggled to move out of the haze of sleep on a lazy Sunday morning an item on the news caught my attention, “Bear in East Vancouver.” My groggy mind shouted out: “Hey! *I* live in East Vancouver! There’s a bear here?” Contrary to perhaps popular belief of Canada, I live in a particularly urban area. Bears don’t wander down into a city of approximately 2 million and try to blend in with the population, plus they have to pass through all the “buffers cities” – I mean suburbs first. To make a long story short, it becomes a long jaunt for a bear to make through traffic, residences, and businesses to make it to my little area of Vancouver.

[Oh alright, East Van is not quite as small as I make it out to be, but the bear did end up making it out to where I live. I could've looked out my window and saw it meander down my alley or biked right on up to it the night before!]

It turned out that the bear became a black bear cub as the morning wore on. And soon it was found in the backyard a few blocks away from where I live. As it lay resting post-traumatic run in with a car, the year and a half old bear was tranquilized and captured, soon to be released back into the wild.

This makes me wonder why a bear would wander so far into an urban area, the answer is no longer can be summed up simply as the continued encroachment of cities into their natural habitat. It’s also the change in our climate, as our winters become longer and summers more extreme, bears are hibernating for longer with much less food. As forested areas become fewer and the natural grub of bears more scarce, it’s easy to see why they would come deep into the cities to look for “fast food.” I don’t need to harp on or continue on to say how interconnected we are, there are many other blogs and articles doing that. But what I did want to say is why aren’t we paying closer attention? Or perhaps the better question is, why should we care?

Perhaps this famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller about the Holocaust finds an eerie relevance with the current environmental movement.

Polar bears are drowning and have now been put on the most endangered species list by the Bush Administration, in the middle of the pacific there floats a plastic ocean [ever growing], yet everywhere I look, there’s another cloth grocery bag. Perhaps there is hope yet.

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to register for the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup coming up this September. With a record goal of trying to have 1,800 community sites to clean across Canada, every set of hands is welcome. Check out www.vanaqua.org/cleanup for more information.

Image of bear cub courtesy of CTV Globe Media.

See you there!

The TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is now on Facebook! If you have a Facebook account (or even if you don’t), simply click here to head on over and visit. While you are there, be sure to show your support of the program by becoming a “Fan” of the Cleanup.

What does our page on Facebook have to offer?

You can:

• Meet other Site Coordinators and individuals interested in shoreline cleanups
• Check out our photo gallery from last year’s national event (and add your own!)
  
• Contribute to our discussion board
• Share your tips, stories, or unusual finds

Whether you’ve organized a cleanup in the past, helped out at one, or are just passionate about clean shorelines, please drop by.

It’s National Volunteer Week!

And we wanted to take this opportunity to thank the thousands of people who participated in keeping our shorelines clean last year. We could not have done it without you and we cannot continue without you either. Come out and join us again this year and to help keep our shorelines free of litter.

Keep your eyes peeled for more posts linking to blogs, articles and videos by and about the people who participate in annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup.

As I was scanning through YouTube a few weeks ago, I came across this short video posted by one of our participants from the 2007 TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. It’s short, sweet, and will hopefully start you off on your own “hunt” for treasures.

For those interested in continuing the hunt for the elusive shopping cart, sign-up for the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup and bring along your very own field manual on the Stray Shopping Cart which can be found at www.strayshoppingcart.com/.

For this entire week (April 27 – May 3, 2008), Canadians everywhere are celebrating their volunteers as part of National Volunteer Week. This week is the biggest celebration of volunteers and volunteerism in Canada, and YOU are a part of it!

This year’s theme is “From Compassion to Action”, and it truly captures the spirit of Site Coordinators and Cleanup participants. Your compassion for shoreline cleanups leads to tremendous action all across the country. We couldn’t be any prouder of your commitment to shoreline health.

The following pictures provide just a glimpse into the great work that you all do on our shorelines every September! Keep it up!

From all of us at the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup… THANK-YOU!

If you have not yet signed up to coordinate a cleanup, please visit the website at www.vanaqua.org/cleanup to register.

For more information on National Volunteer Week, visit the Volunteer Canada website.

Come check out the Green Living Show this weekend in Toronto at the Direct Energy Centre (Toronto Exhibition Place). Even Bill Clinton will be dropping by!

We’ll be there at the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup Booth, with information on the cleanup, and how the public can get involved in this year’s event. Our booth is #3442, past the main stage towards the Bike Track and Trials.

This year’s show has doubled in size and will feature over 400 exhibitors for all thing’s Green.  Be sure to come check it out!

Show hours:

• Friday April 25: 10 am – 9 pm
• Saturday April 26: 10 am – 9 pm
• Sunday April 27: 10 am – 6 pm

For more information on the upcoming show, visit the website here.

Hope to see you this weekend!!

For those of you who noticed, last week CTV reported on the 2007 Final Report for the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) released by the Ocean Conservancy. You can find the story here. Around the world, 76 countries participated in this event promoting direct action and 2,755,876 kgs of litter was retrieved from shorelines and coasts. Within Canada, 52,263 people came out and removed 87,489 kgs of litter from 1,240 locations all across Canada during the week long TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. This annual initiative encouraged thousands of people to make a difference immediately.

“Our ocean is sick,” says Laura Capps, Senior Vice President at Ocean Conservancy. “And the plain truth is that our ocean ecosystem cannot protect us unless it is healthy and resilient. Harmful impacts like trash in the ocean, pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction are taking its toll. But the good news is that hundreds of thousands of people from around the world are starting a sea change by joining together to clean up the ocean. Trash doesn’t’ fall from the sky it falls from people’s hands. With the International Coastal Cleanup, everyone has an opportunity to make a difference, not just on one day but all year long.”

Trash in the ocean kills more than one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles each year through ingestion and entanglement. This year, 81 birds, 63 fish, 49 invertebrates, 30 mammals 11 reptiles and one amphibian were found entangled in debris by volunteers. Some of the debris they were entangled or had ingested include plastic bags, fishing line, fishing nets, six-pack holders, string from a balloon or kite, glass bottles and cans.

Prevention is the real solution to trash in the ocean.” (From The Ocean Conservancy’s Online Media Kit)

To add yourself to this growing movement to clean our environment, register for the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup today.

In case you didn’t catch it, your hard work in last year’s cleanup is big news!

Check out this story on the CTV.ca website:   100,000 kg of trash hauled from Canada’s coasts

Along with the 75 other countries who participated in the Ocean Conservany’s International Coastal Cleanup, more than 378,000 volunteers took to their local shorelines!  Just like Canada’s shorelines, cigarettes and cigarette filters took the top spot (1,971,551 collected across the globe!).  And with no major surprises, food wrappers and containers took the second place (693,612 items).

If you haven’t already registered for this year’s cleanup (Sept 20 – 28) head on over to www.vanaqua.org to register a cleanup location.  To date, we already have 526 cleanups registered (with an estimated 21, 937 participants!). 

Keep it up Canada!