This summer\u2019s sweep was funded by the remains of a CAN $1-million grant from the Japanese government to clean tsunami debris off British Columbia\u2019s coast. But we don\u2019t need a tsunami to get plastic in the ocean; Ocean Legacy estimates that only a third of what they collect comes from the 2011 disaster. Every year, coastal nations send a combined 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic into the ocean, but Canada, which has more coastline than any other country in the world, has little to no funding or mainstream solutions for dealing with what washes up here. Left to degrade on shore, the plastic breaks down into ever smaller fragments that animals eat or that leach flame retardants, insecticides, and other toxic chemicals into the environment.<\/p>\n
![](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/chloe-sack-plastic-peninsula.jpg\")
<\/a>Chlo\u00e9 Dubois perches on a sack full of plastic marine debris gathered from the western shores of Vancouver Island last summer. Photo courtesy of Ocean Legacy Foundation<\/p><\/div>\n
Conservation groups often have no choice but to landfill the sun-bleached, brittle plastic they collect. But that ending isn\u2019t good enough for Ocean Legacy, which Dubois founded with her partner, James Middleton, three years ago. With an ambitious goal of upcycling the 20 tonnes or so of material they collected this summer, they aim to prove that plastic waste can become something valuable\u2014and to ultimately disrupt the cradle-to-ocean cycle of plastic mismanagement. Otherwise, debris will keep washing up on shore and the cleanups will truly become the Sisyphean ordeal they seem to be. If they succeed, they will have pulled off the greatest alchemy the modern world has ever seen: turning garbage into gold.<\/p>\n
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Along a dreary road lined with warehouses in Vancouver, a door is propped open with a salt-eaten buoy. \u201cHow are you?\u201d I ask a long-haired man sitting out front sipping coffee. \u201cSick of taking caps off bottles,\u201d he answers. This is Eric McGillveray, Ocean Legacy\u2019s head of mechanical operations, whom everyone calls Dexter, after the cartoon character from Dexter\u2019s Laboratory<\/em>. True to his nerdy namesake, he flourishes in the dark engine room of Ocean Legacy\u2019s trawler that dragged the barge into Delta. But right now the team needs hands, not mechanical expertise. After the trawler docked last month, Lush cosmetics donated this warehouse to Ocean Legacy to sort its driftage. In addition to their own haul, Ocean Legacy offered to pick up, sort, and recycle material from other organizations that conducted cleanups: Sail and Life Training Society, the Surfrider Foundation, and the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council. Now, Dubois and her colleagues have only 14 days to prepare a pile roughly the size of a blue whale for recycling.<\/p>\n James Middleton, cofounder of Ocean Legacy, conquers a cube of mixed plastic. Photo courtesy of Ocean Legacy Foundation<\/p><\/div>\n Little-known fact: recyclers have high standards. Residential recyclers specialize in recognizable domestic products that come from a home, not the ocean. They\u2019re wary of breaking their state-of-the-art sorting machines on whatever may be stuck to marine debris. There\u2019s an identification problem, too. After a long journey at sea, ocean plastic is often missing its imprinted resin code that says what type of plastic it is. In short, most recyclers have neither the equipment, nor the time, nor the financial motivation to process plastic that is way past its prime. \u201cEveryone has been saying, \u2018No, no, no,\u2019\u201d says Dubois.<\/p>\n This means Dubois, McGillveray, and Middleton are spending every day, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., dumping sack after sack onto the warehouse floor and combing through the contents by hand. \u201cUntil we create artificial intelligence robots that can see and feel as well as we do, [the process] is completely manual,\u201d says McGillveray. The common plastic water bottle is a particular pain. Carved into the underside is a \u201c1\u201d surrounded by a triangle: a resin code that stands for polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. The bottle\u2019s cap is resin code five for polypropylene. Recyclers separate PET from polypropylene in order to sell a homogenous plastic for the highest price possible. And yet, people are surprisingly good at screwing caps back onto bottles\u2014tightly. Meanwhile, the bags of mystery multicolored foams are multiplying. Without a recycler in place, the foam might scotch Ocean Legacy\u2019s lofty zero-waste goal.<\/p>\n Four days into the sorting, Dubois takes me on a tour of what they\u2019ve separated so far. There are 18 sections, each marked with a handwritten sign: rubber, metal, glass, foam, bags, buoys, and so on. There\u2019s a section for shoes\u2014many of them lost soles from the victims of the 2011 Japanese tsunami. (This is one of the many reasons Dubois bristles when people call ocean plastic \u201cgarbage.\u201d) Some sections, such as foam and buoys, are divided into smaller sections: dirty foam, mixed foam, and clean foam, or good buoys, broken buoys, and cork buoys.<\/p>\n In lieu of mainstream recyclers, Dubois and the team have spent years tracking down experimental processors willing to take a chance on ocean plastics: companies like Lush and Adidas and factories in nearby Coquitlam and in Ohio. The trick, however, is delivering a homogenous resin that these companies can vaporize into petroleum, remold into cosmetic bottles, or spin into fabric for shoes.<\/p>\n<\/a>