The pandemic isn’t slowing down the amount of pollution dumped along Hornby Island’s shoreline.
But it also hasn’t dampened the efforts of volunteers willing and able to pick it up.
Last week, 41 volunteers covered much of the island’s shores during the Conservancy Hornby Island’s Earth Day Beach Cleanup.
Given COVID considerations it was self-directed with volunteers mostly choosing their own areas and reporting back on their garbage hauls.
“Oyster trays I do know about, 36 intact ones plus broken pieces were left at the recycling depot, (my partner & I took them over to Denman to add to the enormous amount there – which will eventually be delivered to Sea Legacy, an organization that can process them),” said clean-up coordinator Joanne Wyvill.
“Since then four more have shown up.”
Wyvill says she was a team of six who cleaned one long stretch of shoreline.
“We filled the back of a pickup truck with bags full of styrofoam chunks, plastic ropes, plastic containers, bottles, shoes, clothing, small plastic and styrofoam fragments, (and) styrofoam filled tyres,” she shared.
“This is fairly typical of what other volunteers recovered. A car bumper was a more unusual find, as was a large rectangular plastic encased float – light but an effort to get hold of and carry.”
