The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Doing their part for the ecological betterment of the lake this little community is situated on, Snow Lake's grade 9 to 12 students recently took part in the Great Canadian Shoreline Clean-up. Lynore Spruyt, the vice-principal of Frontier School Division's J.H. Kerr School, explained that students were given from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. on the first day of fall to remove garbage and other undesirable objects from sensitive aquatic habitat along the shores of Snow Lake. "The students cleaned along the east shore of the lake and the shoreline along the Sunset Bay Subdivision boat launch," said Spruyt. "In addition to cleaning up and bagging the garbage they found, they had to keep a written log of every article that was removed from the shore." The objective of the clean-up was to raise awareness and change attitudes about litter and aquatic garbage. In addition to this, the data that was collected in the process will eventually be used to help change government legislation and tailor various conservation projects. The Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Center is the main sponsor and originating agency for the clean-up, however there are a number of other organizations involved with this worthwhile objective. The TD Bank, Encorp Pacific Canada, Waste Management Canada, The Ocean Conservancy, and The World Wildlife Fund of Canada are the others. Spruyt reports that on the whole Snow Lake's shoreline is relatively clean, however the piece or type of garbage that was most prevalent on the local shores were candy wrappers and plastic bags. "There were 320 wrappers found and 180 bags," said Spruyt. "There were also 138 cigarette butts and 112 pieces of building material," she added. These findings differ slightly from the log sheets handed in nationally in 2003. Great Canadian Shoreline Clean-up literature states that cigarette butts were the most common item found during that cleanup. That literature also advised that butts are of particular concern because the filters are made up of cellulose acetate, a thermoplastic used in the manufacture of photo film. This means that they take between two to five years to degrade and when they do, they release toxic chemicals in the process. Other aquatic garbage causes problems with wildlife entanglement, as in the case of six pack rings and fishing line, or can result in lead poisoning and death from an animal's ingestion of fishing weights or lead shot from guns. One other interesting item from the 2003 cleanup was the fact that over 20,000 volunteers picked up more than 49,000 kilograms of garbage from the country's shorelines. Surely the amount of garbage picked up will increase in proportion with the number of people volunteering to help. Let's all hope that eventually because of this program and others like it, people become better educated and both those numbers fall in the future. All in all, it is nice to see Snow Lake students doing their part.
