The story behind the Tire Islet clean-up

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A waste education program from Powell River recently cleaned up an islet that was partially buried under tires. Cortes Currents republished the story from qathet Living and that probably would have ended the matter, except some of you had questions. The biggest one was something between shock and disbelief that such a beautiful Islet had actually been turned into a tire dump. So Cortes Currents asked Abby McLennan of Let’s Talk Trash for an interview.

Abby McLennan: “We first came across Tire Island when we were doing some scouting for shoreline cleanup projects this summer, so early June.
We are in partnership with the Ocean Legacy Foundation through the province's Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative. It was our second summer under this initiative. We saw this little island.”

“From afar, it looked like a bunch of black stuff on top of it, like little black mountains. As we got closer, we saw that it was actually tires. It was overwhelming the amount of tires we could just see from the water.”

“This little islet is on the east coast of Nelson Island, three quarters of the way down the island. You could see this islet when you're on the BC Ferry route heading from Saltery Bay to Earl's Cove. I took that route in October and could see it with my bare eyes from the ferry. It's hard to tell what exactly is on the island, but if you had binoculars it would show up as tires.”

“We didn't select it as a project in our initial round of cleanups just because it looked pretty complicated. There was no great landing spot and the amount of tires looked pretty overwhelming.”

“Later in the season, after all the established projects were complete, there was some underspent money in our budget, so I was like, ‘I'm now willing to take on this larger tire island project.’”

Cortes Currents: How many tires were there?

Abby McLennan: “2,409 tires.”

I was pleasantly surprised to be able to get 30 workers and a couple boat operators. So 33 people, in total, came out during the very last weekend of October, right when the weather turned. It was cold, a little bit drizzly and I was expecting to not be able to get all the tires. I was like, ‘We'll just get as many as we can. They'll know how many's left and that's better than nothing.’ But we were able to get every last single tire and not work a super full day. We were done by around 3:30-4:00 o’clock each of those days.”