A group of 20 to 25 volunteers spent their Saturday haulingcchunks of styrofoam from the shoreline near lot 20 at Cape Roger Curtis up to an industrial sized bin in place in the nearby parking lot. The styrofoam was part of an old floating dock washed ashore, and was found a week earlier by a Donald Gordon, who came to Bowen to explore the shoreline he knows well from the perspective of a boat.
"When I saw it I felt sick," said Gordon, who calls styrofoam his personal loathing. "I've been cleaning up styrofoam on beaches all over the Straight of Georgia, but mostly on Laskidi Island, for about ten years now. What really bugs me about it is that this problem could so easily be addressed. When people build docks they could use plastic floats, which can be recycled and don't break apart into a million pieces, but they don't because styrofoam is cheaper. And there's no accountability."
After going back to Vancouver, Gordon mentioned the "styrospill" to Matt Maxwell as he was settling up his bill for staying two nights at his bed and breakfast. Maxwell contacted Brenda McLuhan who started organizing a clean-up.
"I sent a letter to everyone on council, but the Mayor was the only one who got back to me," says McLuhan. "So I'd really like to give him kudos for that."
The Municipality organized a placement of the garbage bin, and also contacted the property owners of Lot 19 so that the volunteers could clean up the mess without trespassing.
The first volunteers to arrive at the site of the styrofoam mess started their work at 10:30 on Saturday morning.
An hour and a half after starting the job, Terry Pike was digging out confetti-sized pieces of styrofoam from a tide-pool.
"On the surface it looks like a few inches but here, I've already dug down a foot and a half, and that's after taking away the big chunks. The pieces get smaller the deeper you go. "Some of the big chunks were more than a meter long, and surprisingly heavy. To avoid accidents that might happen carrying them up the steep and slippery hillside, the volunteers used the 'human-chain' approach, taking a few steps and passing the piece up to another volunteer who would do the same. As there were not enough volunteers for a chain to go all the way up to the parking lot, they made a pile halfway up the hill and repeated the exercise.
By 1:30 the crew had filled the bin, making sure it was packed as tightly as possible to hold all the debris they collected. Still, large sections of the dock remained onshore, including one large portion that likely has styrofoam underneath but is too heavy to lift.
"You'd be risking life and limb to try and move those and get them up the hill," says Bruce Russell, who says he put aside his political differences with many of the others working on this project in order to get the job done. "So I talked to Brian Biddlecomb [Cormorant Marine] to see if he could help out with his tug boat."
After seeing the wrecked dock, Biddlecomb said that the dock could be removed quite easily with a crane on one of his tugboats. After seeing the wrecked dock, Biddlecomb said that the dock could be removed quite easily with a crane on one of his tugboats. However, he was reluctant to volunteer his resources, saying he would have to at least cover his costs which would run, "at least a few hundred bucks."
Also, the Municipality would have to agree to a location where the dock could be placed on shore, and come up with a plan to discard it.
Pam Dicer, one of the clean-up volunteers and the Birding Director of the Bowen Island Nature Club, explained that as styrofoam stays in the ocean, it breaks down into smaller and smaller chunks which get covered in algae and ingested by fish and birds who then die because it gets stuck in their digestive systems.
"It's everywhere in our environment," says Dicer. "They say, that if you eat fish, you eat styrofoam."
Dr. Peter Ross, a specialist marine mammal toxicology formerly with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, confirmed Dicer's explanation of styrofoam's impact on the environment.
"You can chose to clean it up while its still intact, or let mother nature take care if it in a million little pieces," says Ross. "If you chose the latter option, fish, sea-turtles and birds will do the job and die in the process."
Ross also noted that styrofoam is considered a deleterious substance under the Fisheries Act. This means that the owner of the dock is responsible for cleaning up the mess. Refusing to take that responsibility. Refusing to clean-up the mess could result in a substantial fine.
