The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is one way to make a difference in one’s own little corner of the world — that part of it, at least, which happens to be shoreline.

Three Northumberland sites have already been registered for the 17th annual event, to be held between Sept. 18 and 26, according to communications co-ordinator Jean Fong. The deadline for others to register is Sept. 10.

“Anyone can register to organize a cleanup at any shoreline in the community, as long as no one else has registered to clean that particular site, ” Fong adds.

Nine Northumberland sites were registered for the 2009 event, with 229 volunteers covering 16 km. of shoreline and removing 267 kg. of litter.

The top five items recovered in Northumberland were (in order) cigarettes and cigarette filters, food wrappers or containers, beverage bottles, caps and lids, and plastic bags.

Nationwide, Fong says, about 30% of the litter picked up is a result of smoking-related activities. About 65% of the litter results from shoreline and recreational activities. The remainder originates from ocean and waterway activities, dumping activities, and medical or personal-hygiene waste.

The program began in 1994 on the west coast, when Vancouver Aquarium employees wanted to collect data on shoreline litter they removed from a local beach in Stanley Park.

It became the Great BC Beach Cleanup in 1997, and the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup in 2001.

In 2009, nearly 57,000 Canadians registered to cleanup 1,568 sites, removing almost 161,000 kg. of litter along some 2,500 km. of shoreline– the equivalent of the approximate driving distance from Vancouver to the Manitoba-Ontario border.

Along with the benefit of the litter being removed from sensitive ecosystems, organizers always pass along info on the wildly unusual items found — false teeth, furniture, a canoe made out of duct tape, a disco ball, a wedding dress, a bicycle, pink plastic doll limbs, a parking-ticket machine, a bag of stolen purses, a rickshaw, Celine Dion albums, a White Spot uniform, a mannequin dressed in a bathing suit and even a message in a bottle ( “Please don’t litter,” it said).

So far in 2010, more than 700 cleanup sites are registered in Canada, 240 of them in Ontario.

via Clean up your own little piece the shoreline – Northumberland Today – Ontario, CA.