The start of September means that students are heading back to school and that Fall is on its way. September also means “Back to Shorelines” for our Site Coordinators! We have an astounding number of cleanups registered this year, and we are truly impressed by this year’s turnout.

We have been sending our packages out on a weekly basis so many of you will have received them already. You can also check to see if your package has been mailed by logging into your personal cleanup account and checking the “Package Sent Date” in the Cleanup Details box of the “My Cleanup Info” tab.  If you require additional supplies, please download the “Donation letter” template from the “Resources” tab for help seeking donations within your community.

The “My Cleanup Info” tab also displays the information we have been able to obtain from local municipalities. If there is no information listed, this means we did not receive any instructions. Please follow our normal recommendation of contacting your local city waste department directly to arrange this or using existing public bins (if available).

Have fun on the shorelines, and stay tuned for future posts on this year’s cleanup!

As I was going through my handy dandy set of online news alerts, this article caught my attention, “Hair rollers among rubbish netted in Knoydart clean-up.”

It is nice to know that one can find odd and unusual items along beaches and shorelines beyond Canada. Last year, some of the most usual items that were littered across Canada were

• underwear
• furniture
• a stethoscope
• traffic signs
• compasses (for those who were lost because the traffic signs have disappeared)
• a yoga instruction kit
• a homemade parachute
• hockey equipment
• a treasure map in a bottle
• a burned trailer
• overalls stuffed with pillows
• an antique sewing machine
• a Hibachi BBQ
• fire extinguishers
• bikes
• car parts
• gas cans
• oil drums
• a projector’s reel
• park bench
• satellite dish
• real estate signs
• a wheelchair
• an IV bag
• a metal brake from a snowsled
• shopping carts

This does make me wonder what wonderfully odd treasures our shores hold for us this year?

The disappointing thing about finding these items is that these items did not originate from water, they originated from land. Through the actions and behaviours of people have these items ended up resting along the shorelines of ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans.

In addition to marring the view of our shorelines, some of these items also leach harmful chemicals into the water and land – affecting both wildlife and the community surrounding it.

Luckily, the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is here to remind people that you can make a difference. Through individual actions to remove litter from shorelines across Canada, the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is able to gather data about the types of litter that encroaches the natural environment and keep it off the beaches.

Join the 15th Annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup and be part of the solution. Register to cleanup a location near you by visiting www.vanaqua.org/cleanup or call 1-877-427-2422.

For those of you who haven’t heard, the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation and Canadian Sailing Expeditions will offer one lucky registrant of the 2008 TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, a sailing sailing expedition in Eastern Canada.

Below is the news release that went out earlier this week to the media. Good luck to everyone participating in the 15th Annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. We look forward to seeing you on our shores!

TD Friends of the Environment Foundation Shows Canadians Cleaning Up Can Mean Shipping Out

New contest encourages Canadians to volunteer for the 15th annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup for a chance to win an exclusive sailing expedition

TORONTO—July 14, 2008—Salty sea air, fresh local cuisine and leisurely days filled with cycling and kayaking during a sailing trip to some of the most beautiful regions of this great country. This is just a taste of the experience to come for the grand prize winner in TD Friends of the Environment Foundation’s (TD FEF) new nation-wide contest. In an effort to encourage Canadians to register for the 15^th annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, all volunteers who register prior to the August 31^st deadline will be automatically entered for a grand prize draw for a trip for two on a stunning Canadian sailing expedition.

“Last year we set records; over 50,000 volunteers helped remove more than 87,000 kilograms of garbage from Canada’s shorelines, waterways and lakes, but there’s still more work to be done,” said Roger St. Louis, Regional Manager, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation. “We want this year’s cleanup to surpass these records, which is what we hope the contest will help us achieve. The more volunteers we register, the more shorelines we can clean, making our waters cleaner and safer for generations to come.”

The grand prize draw will be held on September 12^th and the winner will have a choice of one of six Canadian sailing expeditions valued between $8,000 to $11,000. All packages feature a hands-on sail training program, guest lectures and entertainers and access to the ship’s bikes and sea kayaks. Air transportation to and from the departure and arrival cities of each expedition and ground transportation between ship and airport are also included. The packages’ destinations span Quebec to the Maritimes:

1. Halifax to Québec

• A trip for two for ten days/nine nights to Halifax, Canso, Charlottetown, Gaspé, Baie-Comeau, Tadoussac, Québec City

2. Québec Maritime

• A trip for two for seven days/six nights to Québec City, Tadoussac, Saguenay, L’Anse-Saint-Jean, L’Île aux Lièvres, La Malbaie, Grosse Île

3. Québec to Newfoundland

• A trip for two for ten days/nine nights to Québec City, Tadoussac, Baie-Comeau, Anticosti, Havre-Saint-Pierre, Mingan Archipelago, Gros Morne, Cornerbrook

4. Fjords, Bays and Tickles-Newfoundland

• A trip for two for seven days/six nights

5. Newfoundland to Nova Scotia

• A trip for two for seven days/six nights to Cornerbrook, Îles de la Madeleine, Brudenell, Canso, Halifax

6. Lighthouses & Coastal Colours

• A trip for two for seven days/six nights to Halifax, Port Mouton, Liverpool, La Have, Lunenburg, Mahone Bay, South Shore

To register as a volunteer and to enter the contest, visit www.vanaqua.org/cleanup. Full contest rules are available on the website. Canadians are also invited to become a fan of the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup page on Facebook and post their favourite sailing pictures via the Flickr application – to post pictures through a Flickr account, the group page can be found under TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup Sailing.

In addition to the contest, TD Bank Financial Group is launching a multi-media marketing campaign to promote this year’s TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. Targeting environmentally-conscious Canadians, ads will appear in the Globe & Mail, commuter papers and magazines including Time, Maclean’s, National Geographic, L’Actualité and Chatelaine. The creative is primarily in TD’s iconic green, featuring a frog in a pond and copy that calls viewers to action. The ads will also appear in transit shelters, targeting specific shoreline cleanup locations and online. FCB developed the creative, and The Media Company is handling the ad buy.

About TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup

The TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is a conservation program of the Vancouver Aquarium and TD Bank Financial Group has been a proud sponsor of the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup through its environmental foundation, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, for more than 12 years. In 2002, TD Bank Financial Group became the program’s title sponsor. In 2007, a record-breaking 50,000 volunteers participated in the national cleanup and removed 87,489 kilograms of litter from 1,240 sites spanning a collective distance of 1,722 kilometres. The cleanup is now in its 15^th year, and the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup in 2008 runs from September 20-28. To register, visit www.vanaqua.org/cleanup.

About TD Friends of the Environment Foundation (TD FEF)

Since 1990, TD FEF has provided $45 million in funding to over 17,000 grassroots environment and wildlife projects across Canada. In 2007, FEF provided $3 million in support of 830 projects. Thousands of TD customers and employees donate to TD FEF on a monthly basis and TD Bank Financial Group contributes in excess of $1 million annually. TD also covers the management costs of running TD FEF; this ensures 100 percent of every dollar donated goes directly to funding environment and wildlife projects in the community where the donation was made. For more information please visit http://www.fef.ca.

We hope everyone had a wonderful Canada Day weekend in celebration of our nation’s 141st birthday.  This year also marks a milestone for the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup.  We are celebrating our 15th anniversary.  Concerned citizens such as yourself have been cleaning our shorelines and tracking harmful litter since 1994!

The lasting success of our program could not be what it is today without the generous support of our donors.  Their support allows us to provide free cleanup supplies for your cleanups, and has allowed our program to continue to grow each year.  As we gear up and prepare to send out supply kits, we’d like to take the time now to recognize the support of our donors, who make it all possible.

For the 2008 Cleanup we’d like to thank:

• DOW Chemical – garbage bags for the entire country
• Encorp Pacific – recycling bags for participants in British Columbia
• Ansell Limited – gloves for every participant

On behalf of the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup and all of it’s participants across the country, Thank-you!

Congratulations to the students of Westmount Elementary for their continuing acts of bravery in making our planet a better place. Lianne Jones, winner of the 2007 Site Coordinator Award of Achievement (School Category), and her students were finalists in the Alberta Emerald Foundation’s education category for their roles in protecting our planet. They were recognized for their many Green Team endeavours, such as taking part in the Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Program and of course, the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. Last year, students collected over 3000 litter items and 50% of these were smoking-related.

Read more about Westmount Elementary’s amazing students here. Keep it up!!

We want to hear from YOU! If you have news to share, let us know and we’ll post it on the Blog! Send a quick e-mail to shorelinecleanup@vanaqua.org, and mention “Blog story” in the subject line.

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 “buffer 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.