Lake Huron Coastal Centre Names Foul Five Most Common Items Picked up During Beach Clean-Ups

by Bob Montgomery

2023 was a very good year for the Lake Huron Coastal Centre's Beach Clean-ups.

Stewardship Program Coordinator Alyssa Bourassa says they had 14 beach clean-ups this year and 740 volunteers were able to collect over one-thousand, seven hundred pounds of garbage from Lake Huron beaches. From those items five made the list of the most common or most foul items found on the beaches. The winner by a long shot, was cigarette butts ... eight-thousand two hundred and ten of them. Second, at three-thousand and sixty-one was plastic pieces, food wrappers was third at one-thousand and sixty-five, fourth was paper at one-thousand, one-hundred and twenty seven and fifth was bottle caps at eight-hundred and forty-eight.

Bourassa says cigarette butts are the traditional winners along the Lake Huron shoreline and across Canada. And she says that's a serious problem because what a lot of people either don't know or choose to ignore is that cigarette filters contain plastic, so they don't decompose like other materials do. Bourassa adds, the filters contain seven-thousand chemicals and that can leach into the surrounding soil and water. That's a threat to the water and the wildlife that could pick it up.

The second place material is large plastics and again that doesn't go away, it just breaks down into smaller pieces of plastic. Food wrappers were third and general paper was forth and Boarassa says while paper isn't the perfect alternative to plastic, paper will decompose in two to three weeks, compared to plastic which can take hundreds of years and just get smaller.

Bourassa says she is optimistic that more people are realizing how each little pieces of garbage adds up to a whole bunch of pieces and the number of volunteers that are coming out for the clean-ups suggests that more people are recognizing the impact that can have on the environment. She says this year's 740 volunteers was more than they've ever had in the past.

Bourassa says anyone interested in donating to the Coastal Centre can do that by going to the Lake Huron Coastal Centre website.

photos courtesy of the Lake Huron Coastal Centre