Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup - Overview

Overview

The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is one of the largest conservation initiatives of the Vancouver Aquarium. While coordinated out of Vancouver, BC and Toronto, Ontario, the program reaches into every province and territory of Canada. In 2011, over 56,000 registrants signed up to clean 1,665 sites along the shores of Canada.

This initiative is part of The Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup, an international program encouraging community members to remove litter from their shorelines. "The event focuses on educating and empowering people to become a part of the marine debris solution.". Canada is one of at least 120 countries world wide participating in this program, others include: Australia, USA, Mexico, Singapore, Fiji, Kuwait, Peru, China, Jamaica, Barbados, France and the United Kingdom. Currently, the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is one of the largest cleanup programs in the world.

The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup submits a tally of the data collected from each individual site to the International Coastal Conservancy every year. To see a list of 2009 shoreline cleanup locations in Canada that submitted data, please take a look at the Ocean Conservancy's data overlay for Google Earth.

Some quick statistics on the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup for the last few years: