CLEANING OUR COASTLINES

The life cycle of our marine debris: from flotsam to recycled and beyond

During a beach cleanup on Vancouver Island’s West Coast, Jeff Ignace notices a familiar sight—a luxury cooler. This one is a bright orange colour, dubbed King Crab. Ignace, a member of the Hesquiaht First Nation, flips it over to see if it’s damaged.

These cleanups give Ignace a chance to work locally in a place where there are few employment opportunities. He is a crew member of the Rugged Coast Research Society. In 2023/24, the Nanaimo-based society was one of five organizations to receive funding through the province’s Clean Coast, Clean Waters initiative, a program that hires locals to remove marine debris and derelict vessels from BC coastlines.

The Hesquiaht Peninsula juts into the Pacific, collecting debris. Cleanup crews find the trash sharing tide pools with anemones or blown high onto beach meadows. It’s a non-stop job.

Finding debris after a storm


Not far south of here, in the Strait of Juan De Fuca, 109 shipping containers and their contents were lost from the MV Zim Kingston in an October 2021 storm. Ignace has found all manner of debris from the vessel, including half a dozen coolers, some in pristine condition. Each is worth a few hundred bucks. He inspects the orange cooler—it’s cracked and missing its wheels. After being thrashed against beaches for over two years, it’s now trash.

Sarah Steinbach of Tahsis-based Shorebird Expeditions has never found one of these coolers. She has, however, come across Russian liquor bottles and plenty of round plastic floats. Sometimes these are inscribed with Japanese script, other times gouged by large teeth. Bears chew the floats and styrofoam that have made it above the high tide line. Steinbach and her beach-cleaning team find piles of this stuff below wind-gnarled Douglas fir or in dense salal thickets.

As a local business operator and lifelong west coast resident, she is happy to give back to the community and enlist help from youth around the area. They jump on her boat to visit seldom-seen beaches around Tahsis Inlet. On cleanups, they gain an appreciation for this wild place—and see how much global detritus lands here.

150 kilometres to the northeast, the marine debris found in the northern Discovery Islands is more local. Mostly, it comes from industry: logging, fishing, and aquaculture. In the winter of 2023/24, the Campbell River Association of Tour Operators (CRATO) receives Clean Coast, Clean Waters funding and organizes beach cleanups in this area.

Dean Parsonage, owner-operator of 50 North Adventures, leads the cleanups on the ground. He says a tricky part is sharing beaches with the mainland grizzlies, who also make snacks out of styrofoam.

Cleaning our coastlines

Access difficulties


Besides the trouble with bears, beaches are often difficult to access. Crews must scramble over log-strewn, seaweed-smothered rocks to pick up garbage. Sometimes the styrofoam they find is unwieldy, as large as a golf cart. Often, it’s been battered against beaches into rice-grain-sized pieces (crews have to leave these).

They must sort and clean a huge variety of materials by hand. Common finds include rats’ nests of turquoise nylon ropes intermingled with driftwood and tires of all sizes, often filled with styrofoam that usually comes from broken dock floats.

It’s hard work, but without these beach cleanups, these crews wouldn’t be on the water. The program allows Parsonage and other operators to keep their staff working during winter, when tourism has dried up.

Ocean Legacy Foundation


CRATO members boat the material to Browns Bay, where the Ocean Legacy Foundation (OLF) has set up a temporary collection depot for the project. Eventually, the material is trucked to Richmond, BC to be sorted and cleaned further.

OLF is a Canadian-based non-profit committed to ending ocean plastic waste. Their Richmond facility is the first of its kind in North America, funded by government and private grants and the plastics it recycles and sells.

Outreach and Content Coordinator Carina Ramirez says the Richmond facility can only process certain plastics: polypropylene, polyethylene, and nylon 6.

Tires are sent to another recycler to become playground mats or asphalt. Plastics like PVC are not recyclable and must be sent to the landfill—something OLF tries to avoid. The facility will even hand-clean styrofoam, cutting away unusable bits to ensure it can be recycled at another facility.

Ramirez says most recyclers won’t go this far. Time is money, and it’s faster to throw foam out.

Sorting plastic


The orange cooler Ignace found is made of polyethylene. Workers at the facility visually determine the differences between plastics. If the type isn’t obvious, they use a spectrometer. Then they use mechanical means to shred and wash the material.

This process produces a product of small pellets called Legacy Plastic made from 100% recycled plastic marine debris. Partner manufacturers buy this raw product to build a wide array of useful things, like plastic lumber, park benches, patio furniture, and garden tools. From flotsam to final product, it’s all a staggering amount of work.

Of course, the solution is to keep debris from the ocean in the first place. But proper plastic disposal is a challenge we can’t figure out. Will we reach an enlightened future, where we’ve learned to stop throwing our stuff into the ocean?

The bears, for one, would thank us. And the bright-orange cooler, named after an ocean-dwelling crab, would become un-ironic—as it should be. In the meantime, we must rely on those who dedicate their time and sweat to clean up our remote beaches, even if few will ever visit these places to see the results.