Volunteers keep waves of plastic debris out of landfills

By Randy Shore for the Vancouver Sun

Volunteers are toiling in a Main Street warehouse sorting plastic debris painstakingly picked from B.C’s beaches and islands, some of it originating from as far away as Japan.

Hundreds of bulging “super sack” refuse bags containing tonnes of garbage tower over the proceedings. In their shadow, plastic water bottles, buoys and thousands of less recognizable items are cleaned of barnacles and seaweed, sorted and bagged.

“We get a lot of random, mysterious, hard, mixed plastics, it’s a huge percentage,” said Chloe Dubois, executive director of the non-profit Ocean Legacy Foundation, which is running the Upcycle Challenge Event. 

Hard and clear plastics find a new life in packaging, while Styrofoam can be repurposed into door mouldings and picture frames.

Ocean Legacy has been cleaning the beaches around Nootka Sound since 2014 and disposing of tonnes of garbage. 

“Up until last year a lot of the material collected had been going to landfill, so our group decided it could be done better,” said Dubois. “As an experiment, we brought in all of last year’s debris and tried to recycle as much as possible.” 

Scores of volunteers scoured 13 kilometres of B.C.’s coast over six weeks, bagging about 20 tonnes of plastic, Styrofoam and other trash. The 14-day Upcycle Challenge Event that followed engaged dozens of volunteers and 230 high school students.

At the end of last year’s challenge, 518 kilograms went to landfill, while the remaining 19-plus tonnes were cleverly repurposed into new plastics, rubber reinforcement for concrete and an attempt to produce fuel from rope. This year’s sorting event aims to process at least 50 tonnes of waste. 

That’s the good news. 

The bad news is that these efforts represent a literal drop in the ocean considering B.C.’s 26,000 km of coastline, the vast majority of which has never been cleaned.

Every season brings a new load of trash, some of it debris still floating in from the massive 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. 

Where possible, plastics are sorted by resin code, a number that indicates the composition of the plastic and which materials can be recycled together.

That isn’t always easy, or even possible.

“A lot of our hard, mixed plastics are missing resin codes — it’s incredibly degraded material,” said Dubois. “We get tonnes of bags of mixed materials, so we have 20 categories for how we break that down. It’s very meticulous.”

Ocean Legacy has engaged a small army of environmentally inclined groups and, through a field trip program, trained 230 students in upcycling and recycling materials collected in beach cleanups by 18 groups working the coastline.

“The kids come out to the warehouse to sort Styrofoam and learn about the implications of plastic pollution in the marine environment and about sustainable technology for processing these materials,” Dubois explained.

Ocean Legacy has accepted 700 cubic metres of waste to sort this fall, which has prompted a call for even more volunteers. The hours of operation at the Main Street sorting station have been extended in order to get the job done by the end of October.

“Our long-term goal is to have the sorting operation operating full time,” said Dubois, who keeps the facility operating 16 weeks of the year.

A new purpose for ocean plastics

Ocean Legacy’s effort to find new purpose for ocean plastics took off when Lush Cosmetics’ Vancouver office responded to their pitch for funding with a $25,000 cheque and warehouse space for Ocean Legacy’s pilot sorting event, The 14-Day Upcycle Challenge, last year. 

This year the foundation received support from Lush, BC Parks, Kingsley Trucking, Grieg Seafood, the U-Chuck, Electric Love Music Festival, Captain’s Cove Marina and Signal Warehousing for a total of about $45,000.

Last year’s efforts yielded enough usable plastic that Lush was able to incorporate it into their black and clear plastic cosmetics packaging. 

“We are creating an entirely new value chain for these plastics to keep them from entering the environment,” said Dubois. “It’s not common what we are doing, so we are kind of inventing a new way of recycling plastics with a goal of keeping them out of the landfill.”

Lush is taking 10 tonnes of clear plastic water bottles and the hard, mixed plastics after they’re all cleaned and carefully sorted by Ocean Legacy. 

“We need the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles alone and another stream of high density polyethylene and polypropylene,” said Gary Calicdan, ethical buyer for Lush Cosmetics’ Vancouver base.

Toronto-based Urban Resource Group helped create a process that rendered Ocean Legacy’s recovered plastic suitable for safe plastic packaging, which is produced for Lush by Delta’s Plascon Plastics and Salbro bottles in Ontario. 

“After we sort and clean the ocean plastics, they are ground up and pelletized,” he said. “We were able to mix it into our production of plastic packaging, which has been 100 per cent post-consumer plastic for the past five years. That is part of our brand.”

A production run of clear and black packaging incorporating five per cent ocean plastics hit store shelves last April.

“By spring of next year we will bring ocean plastics to our stores again,” said Calicdan. “We see that this is going to be a continuous thing.”

Tragedy and the Spotlight

While plastic pollution has been a problem for decades, the dire state of the world’s oceans was thrust into the spotlight by the tsunami that rocked Japan in 2011.

The Japanese government estimated that 20 million tonnes of debris had been swept out to sea, material that began washing up on West Coast beaches a few months later. Entire docks, fishing skiffs, and even a Harley-Davidson motorcycle found on Graham Island in Haida Gwaii, caught the attention of the world’s press.

Karla Robison, manager of environmental and emergency services for the District of Ucluelet, has been coordinating cleanup efforts for the past five years, filling barges with waste, cataloguing foreign marine life attached to tsunami refuse and even returning items to their owners in Japan.

Ucluelet created a one kilometre stretch of beach to monitor for Japanese debris, after a request for assistance from the Japanese consul. 

“The consul came to Tofino and Ucluelet to meet with local officials and asked that we take Japanese materials seriously,” she recalled. “It was a very formal ask.”

Scores of volunteers with the help of more than two dozen co-operating agencies from as far away as Japan have been scouring West Coast beaches and filling barges with debris since the massive quake and tsunami.

“Plastic is the most common material you find on the beach,” Robison said. “But our test site yielded materials fouled with Japanese marine species including posts and beams from people’s homes.”

The tragedy and its aftermath have left B.C. with an established and well-coordinated network of organizations dedicated to cleaning fouled beaches, led by the Vancouver Island Marine Debris Working Group (VIMDWG), which has coordinated cleanup efforts funded in part by the Japanese ministry of environment.

“We have worked from the grassroots, from volunteers to diplomatic officials to create this coalition,” said Robison.

While the volume of identifiably Japanese debris has waned over the years, the volume of plastics on B.C. beaches has not. Millions upon millions of plastic items continue to foul B.C.’s beaches.

Plastics from a 2016 cleanup made their way to Ocean Legacy’s pilot sorting project.

“A lot of the beaches that we’ve returned to, we find about 50 per cent as much material the next year on average,” said Dubois. “Some of the beaches, if we leave it for two years, there is as much material as when we started.” 

This year alone, Ocean Legacy took in about 700 cubic metres of materials from locations around Vancouver Island.

Dubois estimates that only a fraction of the material Ocean Legacy sorts is of Japanese origin, meaning the garbage comes from everywhere, including here.

Urgent Need for Solutions

Ocean Legacy is hardly alone in its urgency to tackle plastic pollution.

The Lonely Whale Foundation has partnered with Dell Computers to repurpose eight tonnes of ocean plastic into packaging and recently launched the #stopsucking campaign against plastic straws.

Lonely Whale and B.C.-based Plastic Bank are determined to collect ocean plastics before they break down into microplastics, a form of pollution that is almost invisible to the naked eye, but increasingly widespread throughout the world’s oceans.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch  — also known as the plastic trash vortex — is a vast stretch of degraded plastic gathered by the ocean’s currents. Chemicals that leach from ingested plastic are believed to be toxic to fish and birds.

In 2014, Lush Cosmetics partnered with B.C.-based Plastic Bank, which is tackling plastics pollution from an entirely different perspective.

Plastic Bank was an early partner for Lush, supplying plastic from beach cleanups, but CEO David Katz would rather plastic never entered the ocean at all. 

“The world has it all wrong,” said Katz. “The last thing the world should be thinking about is cleaning up the ocean. If your sink is overflowing and the walls are getting soaked, the first thing you do is turn off the tap.”

Plastic Bank is defining plastic, not as a form of waste, but as a currency, which they call “Social Plastic,” an ethical alternative for manufacturers. 

The organization is building stores in places such as Haiti, Peru and Colombia for the “ultra-poor,” where they can exchange plastics for cash, goods such as high-efficiency stoves and sustainable fuel, and access to Wi-Fi or cellular service.

“Plastic garbage is their money,” he said. “No one would even think of throwing away plastic bottles if they were worth $5 each.”

Plastic Bank is getting buy-in from big players such as Shell Oil, which has committed to using post-market plastics in its packaging.