{"id":55861,"date":"2025-08-09T01:43:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T01:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/55861\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T01:43:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T01:43:19","slug":"pitching-in-cleaning-up-the-ocean-to-preserve-nature-in-b-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/55861\/","title":{"rendered":"Pitching in: Cleaning up the ocean to preserve nature in B.C."},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

James Middleton was a boat captain and Chloe Dubois worked in environment and resource management when they were inspired to co-found the Ocean Legacy Foundation, a non-profit that concentrates on collecting and recycling plastics found in the ocean.Supplied<\/p>\n

The organizers: Chlo\u00e9 Dubois and James Middleton<\/p>\n

The pitch: Founding The Ocean Legacy Foundation<\/p>\n

Chloe Dubois and her partner James Middleton were watching a documentary several years ago about the plight of albatrosses on the Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, a collection of islands that have become a collection point for mountains of plastic waste. <\/p>\n

The couple were living on a boat in British Columbia at the time and their lives revolved around sea life. He was a boat captain and she worked in environment and resource management. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a small documentary just about how the birds out there were ingesting so much plastic and becoming entangled. And it really moved me,\u201d Ms. Dubois recalled from Steveston, B.C., a Vancouver suburb. <\/p>\n

That led them in to launch The Ocean Legacy Foundation in 2013, a non-profit group based in North Vancouver that organizes clean up events and recycling initiatives. <\/p>\n

The organization\u2019s primary program is called EPIC \u2014 Education, Policy, Infrastructure and Cleanup \u2014 and it works with dozens of communities to coordinate pollution removal expeditions. The OLF also ensures that the mounds of plastic collected don\u2019t end up in landfills. <\/p>\n

The group has a network of seven depots across B.C. which serve as education points and waste collection sites. Once the depots are full, the waste is sent to the foundation\u2019s processing facility in Steveston where it is recycled into more than a dozen products such as buckets, gardening tools, planters and construction material. The OLF also has a lab that develops new uses for the recycled plastic. <\/p>\n

The foundation recently launched a membership program to encourage marine businesses to participate in collection and recycling. The hope is to cut down on the amount of fishing gear \u2014 nets, buoys and rope \u2014 that\u2019s discarded into the water. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s about eight to 13 million tonnes of plastic pollution being released on an annual basis, and about 500,000 to a million tonnes of this is abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear,\u201d said Ms. Dubois. <\/p>\n

The OLF currently has around 15 staff but the workforce can swell to 200 depending on funding from donors. <\/p>\n

Ms. Dubois said the growth of OLF has been heartwarming. \u201cIt\u2019s been really inspiring to see so many people want to change how things are currently being done and to join forces to end plastic pollution.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: James Middleton was a boat captain and Chloe Dubois worked in environment and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,2922,66],"class_list":["post-55861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-noastack","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}