by Evan Duggan
VANCOUVER, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- Lorraine Holland walked stooped over as she searched the sandy shoreline sand for cigarette butts and other rubbish.
"This is my first time," said the Richmond, B.C. resident. She's referring to the Great Canadian Shore Cleanup.
The Shore Cleanup is a national conservation program that encourages and helps Canadians to clean up garbage from the shores of the country's three oceans and its countless lakes and rivers.
On Saturday, Holland was joined by over a hundred other volunteers at Richmond's Iona Beach Regional Park. It's a stretch of beach, tidal flats and wetlands on the Pacific Coast near the Vancouver International Airport.
"It's just so necessary," Holland told Xinhua. "To ignore [the garbage] is to show ignorance and I can't be ignorant to the fact that we've damaged the Earth."
Holland and others were equipped with large white buckets, rubber gloves and rubbish pickers. They would be spending the next two hours out in the rain, picking up trash that could be as small as a cigarette butt or as large as a commercial truck tire.
"My big things are the cigarette butts," Holland said. "The Earth is not your ashtray. That's what I really want to see - if we can get all the cigarette butts out of here."
She said Iona Beach holds a special place in her heart. "This [place has] absolutely the most beautiful sunsets in British Columbia."
The cleanup on Saturday marked International Coastal Cleanup Day with Canadian cleanup events also taking place in Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax, said Kate Le Souef, the manager of the cleanup for its lead organizers: Ocean Wise and the World Wildlife Fund.
"Events can take place any time of year," she said. "We encourage people to choose a time that suits them, and we have our big celebration events happening today at four locations across the country because we're celebrating our 25th anniversary."
She said the larger events attracted up to 400 volunteers.
"In our program in general across the country, we're at almost 60,000 registrants so far in 2018 and nearly 2,000 cleanups across the country," she said.
In its 25 years, Shoreline Cleanup participants in Canada have cleaned almost 34,000 kilometres of shoreline and removed nearly 1.3 million kilograms of litter.
"This is a huge site here," Le Souef said. "There is a potential to have a lot of construction materials and larger things that have washed in from the ocean. In the past, we've had up to like 600 pounds of garbage on this day."
Le Souef said while the problem of ocean and shoreline garbage isn't going away, and may be worsening around the world, more people are now aware of it.
"People are starting to get the message that there is plastic in our oceans, plastic in our fresh waters and our personal behaviour is linked to that," she said.
Canada's Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna, joined the cleanup in Richmond.
"Oceans don't know any borders," she said. "We all are in this together."
McKenna said she recently returned from Canada's Arctic where she learned that dead birds and marine mammals are regularly found to be full of plastic.
"We've got a huge problem," she said. "If we don't take action, we will have more plastics in our ocean than fish by 2050."
She said she has three kids of her own who often ask her about the problem. "When I go home, they look me in the eye and say what are you going to do about plastics pollution in our ocean?"
She's thrilled to see the efforts underway here and at other cleanups around the country. "That's what we need to always be thinking about," she said. "It's not just about us, it's about future generations."
