Kincardine community beach clean-up a great success

Members of the Kincardine and area community showed their love for the Lake Huron shoreline, and support for the Lake Huron Coastal Centre, at the clean-up of Station Beach, Saturday morning.

The coastal centre partnered with several local groups, including Huron Bruce Nature, KEAN (Kincardine Environmental Action Network), the Kincardine and District Lions, Sobeys and the Municipality of Kincardine, for this event.

Volunteers from the nature club assisted with set-up, registration, distribution of materials and collection, while KEAN assisted with promotion, collection, recycling and provided a sample microplastics washing machine filter for participants to investigate.

Sixty-eight volunteers, armed with work gloves, buckets and grabber sticks, fanned out over the beach and surrounding parkland to collect trash. Items collected and recorded on the tally cards ranged from beverage containers, bottle caps, food wrappers, packaging materials, pieces of metal and wood to tiny fragments of foam and plastic.

The most numerous by far, were cigarette butts (2,119) which are non-biodegradable and pose a great threat to the environment, leaching toxic chemicals that end up in the water and poisoning fish or wildlife that mistake them for food.

Meredith Watson, program co-ordinator with the coastal centre and lead organizer for this event, was impressed by the attention to detail of participants picking up very small and easily-overlooked pieces.

As volunteers returned, coastal centre staff assisted in sorting collected materials into various receptacles for trash, recyclables, microplastics and cigarette butts. KEAN took the cigarette waste for recycling through Terracycle.

At the end of the event, each category of waste was weighed and recorded before being removed by municipal workers. In total, 74.7 pounds of garbage were removed.

After their hard work, volunteers were rewarded with a barbecue lunch with food supplied by Sobeys Kincardine, and prepared and served by the Kincardine and District Lions Club.

The coastal centre and its event partners are grateful to everyone who participated in, or sponsored, the clean-up.

For more information about the work of the coastal centre, as well as future clean-ups and other events, follow them on social media: Facebook@coastalcentre; visit the website: www.lakehuron.ca; or subscribe to the on-line newsletter.