Ontario tourists dismayed to find plastic garbage on North Shore
Beautiful clean P.E.I. has lost some of its lustre for an Ontario couple.
After returning home from their latest Island vacation, Dominique and George Brian Theriault emailed The Guardian pictures of garbage they discovered while walking on the North Shore.
Since 2013, they’ve been renting a house on Bayview Drive in a peninsula that juts into New London Bay, just east of Stanley Bridge and flanked by two river estuaries.
“Our walks became a plastic garbage collection,” Dominique Theriault said in a telephone interview. “The bulk of it was . . . short tubular plastic netting trimmings entangled in eelgrass, that is, the dead eelgrass that had washed up ashore. This plastic can be ingested by birds, crab (and) fish as the browse the eelgrass and is deadly.” The couple collected a few lengths of expanding tubular netting, some trimmed off knotted ends, some of it plastic rope. They also found a few square inches of sheet foam and plastic strips.
During their walk on one occasion they accumulated more than two cubic feet of loose plastic garbage.
Dominique said, regardless of whether the items are coming from shellfishermen or not, she wanted to bring some awareness to the issue.
“It’s going to have a bad longterm effect, as I see it. I see this (news story) has just a little heads up guys. I’m sure putting it in your pocket or your bag is not going to cut your profits.’’ Dominique said from an esthetic point of view she’s been on beaches around the world that are far worse off, including in tourist destinations. She’s hoping by speaking out and bringing some awareness to it here, people might be a bit more careful.
“The people of P.E.I. are fairly reliant and resilient people. I think this is just an awareness thing. I understand agriculture and fisheries are essential, but just because you don’t see the immediate result … you don’t want to be eliminating the wildlife that you live on.”