The Beach That Doesn't Need Cleaning Anymore

0:00 I want you to picture a beach cleanup for a second. You're out there for two hours or so hauling in bags of bottles, like wrappers and foam, all that kind of stuff, now I want you to picture that exact same beach maybe 10 years later or so. And when you walk, like the whole thing, when you walk along that beach, you come home with nothing in your hands. Like, just imagine that. Not because nobody cleaned it, but just because there was nothing to clean. The work that you did 10 years ago doesn't necessarily mean that, the beach is clean. We know that a lot of the plastic and a lot of the pollution that comes in on the beach is usually from the ocean, but it has to do with nearby sources. But just imagine if that was clean 10 years later And be like, "Oh, wow, like I wonder what made this clean." this is a real story, and we're gonna talk about it on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, because this is something you're gonna wanna hear, 'cause local action can really work, in local areas.

0:57 So we're gonna talk about that on this episode. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, a science communicator and a marine biologist, here to give you the updates on all things ocean news, ocean conservation related, and ocean science related. and yesterday, you know, we talked about how, like finding your place within ocean action is really important. And today we're gonna talk about what happens when a community wins when they come together and they do wonderful ocean conservation and ocean action. 'Cause I think a lot of times when we talk about conservation, a lot of it's on paper, it's policy. We don't always see the action happen or even like the results of it happen. But in this case we did, and we're gonna talk about it today. I want you to picture somewhere, a small town in Canada called Tofino.

1:38 Very, very cool town. A bit of a surfer town, It's on the west coast of Vancouver Island, facing the Pacific, last thing to face the Pacific as you go out to Canada. And you're looking at surfers, there are storm watchers there, beautiful old-growth forest, and whales of course, 'cause the BC coast is some of the best coast we've seen. And it's one of the most beautiful places in Canada. but in 2016, its beaches in Tofino were covered in plastic pollution, and the town ran on tourism, and tourism ran on single-use everything, cups, straws, bags, takeout containers. When you go to a restaurant and you wanna have a little bit of extra food when you leave, you take it out in a container or, you're getting a drink and the straw goes in that. All that happens, it's just part of the system.

2:20 And at one point, the area was generating the highest waste per capita of any landfill in British Columbia. That's a pretty high number if you think about it. And then when a local Surfrider chapter in Tofino had just been restarted after years of sitting dormant, 'cause when you have these chapters, it really matters who's running it and how active they would be, because it's, a chapter, it's a volunteer chapter. It's not always run by people who are getting paid full time. They may not be able to dedicate their time. they may have busy lives. And so the people who are a part of it are the people who do the action. So everybody who's a part of it is what tells you if it's dormant or not, if they have time to dedicate towards this. So after it kinda reignited and restarted, they were doing cleanups and pulling in hundreds of pounds of plastic and trash off of each beach.

3:07 And then hundreds to thousands of single-use items at a time. they were like calculating it. They were like observing it. They were recording it. And they realized something, that they could clean these beaches every weekend for the rest of their lives and it would never stop. That's a tough thing to think about, The plastic would just keep on coming. But here's the problem too, We see plastic, it's everywhere. it feels a lot of times like too big to fight. What if we were able to get to a point where we could do something about it, where there's no plastic on the beach that's coming in, even though we see it everywhere, And like, what difference does my little cleanup that I do every week or every month or every couple of weeks do, to the ocean or for the ocean when it just keeps coming back and coming back, and you start to look around, you see all the single-use plastics that's being used?

3:55 We shouldn't have to clean up a mess that's being made faster than we can pick up. That should not be one of our problems. So what we're looking at, say cleanups matter, we know that to go out there and clean it up, you have to take off the trash that's on the beach, the plastic that's on the beach. But the goal is eventually to make it obsolete. It's kind of like, we look at restoration. I've talked about restoration of like kelp forests, speaking of, the West Coast. Kelp forests are used to be all around the West Coast, and now they're disappearing at record rates because of climate change. Well, we could restore kelp forests as much as possible, but if we don't take away the underlying problem of climate change, those kelp forests are not gonna keep up. It's actually been scientifically, published about, where it's like all the restoration in the world is not gonna help unless we stop it from disappearing, protect the kelp that's already there.

4:40 Because one, it's so expensive, and two, it's just not working as fast as we need. continuing on with the story of Tofino, The volunteers in this area, they changed their tactics and instead of cleanups, instead of just picking up the plastic, they went to the source, the businesses that were putting out the single-use plastic. And at first, business owners looked at them like they had like multiple heads, They were like, "Look, this was before plastic pollution blew up in the news." So a lot of people were like, " why does this matter? Like, if I, allow a takeout container or a plastic straw or plastic litter or anything like that, why would this matter?" And the volunteers made a choice, like not to blame the businesses or not to shame them. They didn't wanna do that, Most of the people had never even been taught about plastic pollution.

5:24 They didn't even realize it was a problem. I remember coming up into marine biology, even after my undergrad, I didn't really know it was that big of a problem. I heard about it mostly in the US, and then we started to look at Canada's, and studies started to come out and awareness started to be made a lot more of a priority, and realizing this is one of the biggest problems that we're facing in the ocean. But why would a business owner know about that? So they met people where they were, They asked like what matters to each business and spoke that language. so in Tofino, that turned out to be like pride. Businesses in Tofino see themselves as environmental leaders. it's BC. BC is very environmentally friendly as much as possible. So they signed up a few businesses at first into this program.

6:06 They made them the heroes of the program. They promoted them. They made them look good. And then the other business started saying, "Oh wait, that's cool. I wanna be a part of that. I wanna take place of that because I see the success and I see that people, we know that our customers are environmentally focused." So two of the early champions were the Wickaninnish Inn, a big resort in town, and Jamie's Whaling Station. And they didn't just change their own practices, they sponsored the actual work that was happening. That's pretty cool to think about, and then it got a lot more, I guess real, you could say, The volunteers wanted every restaurant using reusable dishes. But Tofino has a housing crisis, so restaurants can't find staff, let alone extra staff to wash dishes.

6:47 It's doesn't pay enough. Like, you can't pay a mortgage by being a dishwasher. It's very expensive to live in a lot of parts of BC. So they didn't force it, and they worked with local suppliers to find the next best option, So they learned something along the way. Those compostable bioplastic cups made from corn and sugarcane aren't great either, they're not the best thing. They don't break down well, they're barely regulated, and some contain regular plastic. So they landed on fiber-based containers. Basically it's paper. - And if it ends up in the ditch or somewhere, it breaks down, If you ever see, like, those paper type of, like, cardboard get wet, it's gonna break down eventually. And it works in the local compost facility. So that all met what they were doing.

7:28 So maybe they couldn't have everybody, like, doing reasonable dishes because there's just not enough dishwashers. They can't pay someone to do this full-time because that person wouldn't be able to afford to live there, But what they did is they met the people where they were, not just to say, "Hey, you need to do it this way. If you don't do it this way, it's done," You lead with values, not the guilt. And you recruit a couple of early leaders, make them the heroes, promote them, make them feel good about their business, and then other people will follow. And then, of course, you offer those real alternatives, the reusables first, That's great. If not, let's go fiber-based compostables second, This is a tourist town. You're gonna be giving out a lot. This is something, even if they litter, that will dissipate, go into it, and it won't be as bad as plastic, So skip those rigid bioplastics because they may not be good or they may not be regulated like we think they are And of course, keep the accessibility in mind, Keep straws on hand for people who need them.

8:20 We know that there are certain people who will need, plastic straws at all time, and Tofino's bylaws lets anyone ask for a plastic straw. No proof or explanation needs, like, is required or needs to happen. And then, of course, you push for policy. So volunteer change is the start, but bans lock everything in to make sure that the businesses that don't volunteer, they'll eventually have to follow in place, and then you get the results, And then remember that, like, there's that tipping point. You don't need a majority. You just need a few to kind of come on, on board. In a 2018 experiment published in Science, a committed minority of about 25% was enough to flip the group's established norm, So just a quarter of the group can make a huge, huge difference.

9:03 Now, over the next decade, Tofino and its neighbors, Euclid, banned plastic straws, then bags, then cutlery, then foam containers. And on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2026, this past April, Tofino became the first municipality in Canada to ban the sale of single-use plastic water bottles of one liter or less because it wasn't necessary. And the result was great. Surfrider doesn't run local beach cleanups there anymore 'cause they don't need to, Businesses and residents, they do their own. People litter less. like, because it's become a pride. Public waste management got better. This is all because of a prideful thing of we wanna be environmentally friendly. And if you walk the beach in Tofino today, you'll be hard-pressed to find anything that has to do with trash or plastic pollution in any kind of way.

9:47 And Victoria and Vancouver have now seen the same thing, and the beaches are far cleaner than they used to be. It took a decade. That's it. That's how long it took. And if you really think of it, you may seem that that's a long time. It's actually not that long. When you start to think of a problem that's as bad as plastic pollution, you might be able to get right if you get the local businesses on track, get them part of the community, get them to buy into the pride of what they want their local community to look like. So your call to action this week is to have one conversation with a local business owner you already know, Your coffee shop, your favorite takeout place, whatever that might be. don't lecture, just ask, "Have you ever thought about reusables or something a little bit better? And what would make it easier to do that?"

10:29 And sometimes you may not have an answer. They may say, "Well, it's the price. Like, we just can't afford it," or what have you. Or they're part of a franchise, and that might be a bigger question because franchises have their specific things that they have to do. But what it does do, it allows people to really move forward on what they can do and have that conversation for the next steps, and I think that's really interesting. And if you want backup, you can find or start a local charter group or chapter group for the, Surfrider Canada Foundation if you're in Canada, or Surfrider, or join a group if you see that as well. But here's the thing. If we don't actually do anything, we need to clean up the same beaches over and over and over again, which I guess is fine, but it's still not taking away what's happening.

11:10 But if we actually decide to act, we can do cleanups. And we can ensure that cleanups are obsolete, and the people doing this work are trying to put themselves out of a job. Nobody wants to do beach cleanups all the time. They want it to stop eventually. This is just a Band-Aid over the larger thing that we need to do, So this is all part of a week of action, and, this is one of those stories where it's like, hey, we actually see optimism here. We see that we can get results from the work that we do. And tomorrow I'm gonna talk about a video, a sea turtle video, you're probably all familiar with it. It went viral back a number of years ago where, a plastic straw was taken out of a sea turtle's nose. And, I interviewed some of the people that were a part of that.

11:50 It went viral. it just spawned this national or international action against plastic straws. But then it also spawned a backlash against paper straws. But I'm gonna talk about why that misses the point, because there's a lot in there, and I feel like a lot of people miss it, and they use that as a way to kind of rebel and feel prideful and sometimes manly. And it's really weird at times. but it's not really helping in the conservation movement. But anyway, until next time, I would love to know what's a business in your town that you would love to see go plastic-free. Let me know in the comments below. If you're on Spotify, there's a comment section, that'd be great. If you are on another app that you love to listen to this app, we really appreciate you listening.

12:31 Hit me up in my socials. All you have to do is just go to the show notes and check it out. you can click the link to get into the DM me. I'd love to hear from you. I'm on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, whatever that might be. And I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.