July 3rd is International Plastic Bag Free Day! We are celebrating this day by asking everyone to take the plastic free pledge! For just one day, or perhaps even longer! From 2-6pm, volunteers will be at the Surfrider tent outside of RBC in Cook St. Village. Come by the tent and learn about our Rise Above Plastics program and sign the petition to ban single-use plastic checkout bags in Victoria!…
A small program to clean up downtown Victoria’s streets has mushroomed in just a month. About 25,000 discarded cigarette butts were gathered in the city over the past month, thanks to the expansion of a collection program. A lone disposal container for butts was installed on Broad Street outside Coastline Surf Shop, and now 19 more, worth about $100 each, have been placed around downtown. It’s part of a pilot…
Local members of the Surfrider Foundation have a simple message for smokers: Hold on to your butt. The environmental group’s multi-city campaign urges smokers to dispose of their cigarette butts somewhere other than streets, parks and beaches, proclaiming: Beaches and Streets Are Not Ashtrays. For now, there is a single disposal canister for spent cigarettes on Broad Street next to the Victoria Event Centre, but the plan is to add…
Saturday September 28th was a very wet and windy day on the west coast but that didn’t stop a dedicated group of 30 volunteers to participate in the 20th year of the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. The Surfrider Vancouver Island chapter registered a clean up Sombrio Beach within the Juan de Fuca Provincial Park. This year we removed 101 lbs of garbage of the shoreline. Debris found included a tire,…
If you've ever read a story about surfing on the Canadian coast, you're pretty sure to have read a few boilerplate paragraphs about how pristine it is in this part of the world. How bears and wolves stroll past the tent sites on the shoreline, perhaps, or how the lineups are alive with seals and whales, or how the water is a pure psychedelic green and the mountains are a…
Surfrider Foundation, the Downtown Victoria Business Association and the City of Victoria are teaming up for a pilot program to keep cigarette butts off our streets, out of the stormwater system and off beaches. The goal is to install 20 easily identifiable cigarette disposal canisters in downtown Victoria, offering the public a responsible cigarette disposal option. Six businesses have already volunteered to host these canisters. The goal is to have…
Volunteers from Surfrider Foundation Vancouver Island Chapter removed about 2,180 pounds of marine debris from Vargas Island this past weekend. "We removed more garbage from Vargas Island than any beach we've held a clean-up at over the last five years," says chapter chairperson Lucas Harris in a recent media release. Harris believes the success of this clean-up illustrates the level of accomplishment volunteer efforts can achieve in terms of beautifying…
For Lucas Harris, every piece of garbage that a small group of surfers collects on B.C.’s supposedly pristine beaches helps to paint a bigger picture on marine debris. The plastic bottles, fuel containers, buoys, fish nets, ropes and blocks of Styrofoam his group collects (more than one ton of garbage on a recent outing) all help to reveal patterns of waste in the mass of detritus washing ashore daily on…