Dozens Of Bizarre Items Pulled From Lake In Shoreline Cleanup
Posted September 13, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Toronto Police Marine Unit were pulling garbage, including a number of bizarre items, from the water Thursday as they kicked off the 2006 Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup with the help of the Toronto Fire boat.
Similar efforts are happening across the country with volunteers cleaning up trash along their beaches and shorelines. The massive cleanup efforts runs Sept. 16 to 24th and involves over 900 sites and more than 40,000 volunteers.
Last year 10,299 bags of trash, weighing 82,201 kg were pulled from the waters across Canada – trash that could harm local wildlife. Among 90 countries around the world that participate in similar cleanups the Great White North ranks second.
In Toronto, Marine Unit members were looking for trash about eight metres below the surface, and they pulled up some interesting things, including a zebra-mussel encrusted rickshaw, an old chair, a skateboard and even an old reel-to-reel tape player.
“We have found cars down there that have been stolen back in the ’70s, and … we’ve found a garbage truck, forklifts … a golf cart,” Gary Gibson of the T.O. Marine Unit said.
Eric Solomon of the Vancouver Aquarium, the organization that started the shoreline cleanup, said this trash has a terrible effect on the ecosystem.
“Aquatic litter plays a bunch of different roles in the environment, whether it’s a car or whether it’s a piece of plastic, depending on what it is can really do a lot of damage,” he explained.
But people weren’t only busy pulling garbage from the water, they were also picking it off the ground at Little Norway Park in the Habourfront community.
“Somebody threw some garbage in the lake. If some kind of animal under water ate it, it could probably get sick or die, like cigarette butts or something,” a student volunteer named Larissa explained.
Some smokers may not consider their butts to be litter, but the dirty filters are a major source of garbage – last year 208,000 butts were picked up in the shoreline effort – and they take five years to decompose.
For more information on the program, visit www.vanaqua.org/cleanup or call 1-877-427-2422
