Cedar Elementary students scoured 1.5 kilometres of shoreline recently looking for garbage and cleaning up the beach in the process.
A total of 48 children in Grades 1 to 3 and 10 adults, joined in the Great Canadian Shoreline Clean up last week, breaking up into teams of three and picking up trash near the aquarium and Discovery Pier.
The students picked up five pounds of garbage, including 229 cigarette butts, 49 food wrappers, 15 pieces of construction materials, 20 paper bags, 30 cups and plates, 53 plastic pieces, 37 pieces of foam and, thankfully, zero needles.
Dionne Lanqvist, a member of the Cedar school PAC, helped organize the clean up with the help of the Discovery Passage Aquarium.
“They did a really good job,” Lanqvist said. “The aquarium was really organized. I was impressed. They supplied the kids with garbage bags and gloves.”
The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup has been in existence since 2003 and in that time, more than 400,000 participants (including Campbell River schools) across the country have removed nearly one million kilograms of garbage from Canadian shorelines.
The initiative is a joint event led by the Vancouver Aquarium and the World Wildlife Fund.