From being part of the problem to being part of the solution, a reformed litterer and fisherman now spends his days diving to the bottom of Canada’s harbors on trash clearing missions.
Sean Bath used to seek the coveted spiny sea urchin: now it’s often car tires that come loose from the bows of ships and the sides of wharfs.
That used to irk him, seeming them down there, yet he didn’t connect his own fishing habits to the problem of all the trash he’d find on the seabed.
These days, however, Bath runs the Clean Harbors Initiative, where he fundraises money to sponsor diving expeditions to the bottom of harbors in order to clean them up.
He started back in 2018, pulling 15,000 pounds of trash out of the Bay Roberts harbor in an effort to alert the public—in particular those with money to donate—to the danger of “ghost gear,” a colloquial term for lost or abandoned fishing equipment which contributes millions of pounds to the total tonnage of plastic entering the ocean every year.
Not only that, but it’s responsible for the deaths of millions of sea creatures who get snagged, hooked, or strung up among the abandoned nets, lines, and traps.
Bath had long struggled to finance his Clean Harbors Initiative, but things changed for the better after he allowed a documentary crew to follow him around for a year to produce Hell or Clean Water, which premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in spring, 2021.
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Personal donations dramatically increased, and soon Bath could hire another boat and diver, while putting the fear of bankruptcy out of his mind for the time being.
Along with expanding the dive operations, he’s excited to start a new chapter in his Initiative: beach cleaning, a far cheaper and safer operation than diving.
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“We went to Long Harbor with the intention of diving, but the visibility was poor and it just wasn’t safe,” Bath told CBC News, reporting on his story.
“So we decided to expand into cleaning the beaches at St. Croix. Each day we were out there, we were able to collect about three boatloads full of plastics. It’s a sustainable way to do cleanups because it doesn’t require any fuel.”
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