[Reporter] Twilight on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
An idyllic vista that plays into Canada's image
as a relatively untouched haven in a polluted world.
But under the scenic veneer
a deeply troubling, dirty secret.
[Pilot] Pretty well everywhere we stopped here, we'd be finding garbage.
It's just a really difficult place to clean up
even getting the garbage off is really a challenge.
[Reporter] This is where the world's unending love affair with plastics
crashes into the heartbreak of its impact on the environment.
This remote beach rarely sees humans
but it does see a lot of plastic.
The crew is sorting waste, which is being driven ashore by wind and ocean currents
and there's a lot of it.
[Worker] This is good.
[Reporter] Some of the debris can be traced.
For instance, this hockey shin pad was likely from a cargo container that
fell off a ship in the 1990's.
[Worker] It was one of the first documented container spills.
[Reporter] Every step in the cleanup involves sweat and muscle.
Debris is often entangled with wood or other natural objects.
[Worker] I can just cut through them pretty easy.
[Reporter] This dock likely broke up somewhere on the west coast during a storm.
Large styrofoam floats are the target of the cleanup crew.
[Worker] You can roll it over.
[Reporter] Freeing the non-biodegradable foam from the wooden planks
is just step one.
[Worker] Okay.
[Worker] That's a good piece of foam.
[Reporter] Once separated, the foam has to be carried hundreds of metres.
Just off the beach, a vivid lesson on why styrofoam is enemy number one.
[Boulton] This is an old dock that washed up in big pieces
so this stuff gets smashed apart by the logs
all of the winter storm action
will just grind this down into small pieces.
We're left with one little piece like that, that can appear like food for some creatures.
This ends up in a lot of birds.
You can see already just with this degradation, it's become part of the ground.
[Reporter] With so much shoreline to clean, the little stuff usually gets left behind.
[Boulton] We're looking at trying to get the big stuff before it turns into the small stuff.
[Reporter] Once sorted, it's stuffed into giant bags called super sacks.
They line the beach waiting for pickup by helicopter.
[Worker] Not exactly light
and this is what we have to walk over with, all this.
[Reporter] B.C.'s cleanup is covering 1,200 kilometres of coastline
with crews scrambling over jagged rocks and jumbles of slippery, wobbly logs.
[Worker] That probably weighs 200 pounds.
Just that alone.
[Reporter] Often, debris is a tangled mess.
[Ignace] Plastic bags.
[Reporter] Half buried, and too time consuming to extract.
[Ignace] It would take us a month just to do this section alone.
To clear out all of the little stuff that's in here.
[Reporter] A member of the Hesquiaht First Nation, Jeff Ignace grew up on these beaches
and has seen the plastic pile up over his lifetime.
[Ignace] Diving birds that dive in the ocean
they come up with this wrapped around their necks all the time.
They try and eat it when they're diving
and it gets tangled around them and then they drown.
They can't fly, they can't swim, they can't eat.
They starve, and they die.
We had one whale that came ashore that had this kind of green netting
wrapped around three quarters of the animal.
[Reporter] Plastic kills in a variety of ways.
Nets and ropes entangle some creatures
small pieces are mistaken for food and end up causing obstructions in the bellies of animals
and microplastics, the smallest particles, are in every ocean around the world
and increasingly inside creatures up and down the food chain, including humans.
Further north, another beach, another crew and day spent
fighting through high seas...
[Worker] It's got a lot of heavy sand on it
[Reporter] ...freeing trapped debris
and sorting and weighing every piece that's been found.
Onboard one of the support vessels
Skipper Kevin Smith says plastic dumping in the seas needs to be tackled at the source.
[Smith] It's quite sad to to see just how much is coming from the fishing industry.
Deep sea fisheries, it's big trawl nets and enormous heavy lines
that are just choking out the beaches.
[Reporter] Recently, he shot this video.
[Smith] One of the absolute worst sights for degraded microplastics
that I've ever seen.
[Reporter] He says it's devastating to see remote beaches where plastic particles are more numerous than sand.
[Smith] Where we were walking on a rainbow-coloured beach of plastics
and the microplastics is, you know, I think it's the issue for our generation.
[Reporter] But for now, the plastic onslaught continues.
[Worker] Check this out, this whole bank is basically foam.
As far as you can stick your hand in
as far as you can dig in.
Completely, completely disheartening.
This whole bank of this whole bay
in such a beautiful, pristine area.
[Reporter] A fleet of vessels normally employed in the tourist trade
is being used to support the cleanup.
Helping house and feed the workers.
[Campbell] Here, we've actually been able to make an industrial scale difference
and it's really exciting.
[Reporter] Ross Campbell usually hosts foreign visitors aboard his boat.
His business was hit hard by COVID-19
but he and other operators have shifted into cleanup work
paid by a seven-million dollar plastic removal fund set up by the B.C. government.
He wishes more people could see the scale of this largely hidden problem.
[Campbell] There's two ways of looking at this you know, we could either light our hair on fire
because it's an insurmountable problem
or we can realize that the very fact that we're doing this is
letting the world know how bad the problem is and it can't be avoided any longer.
[Reporter] From the beach, debris is slung out beneath a helicopter.
It then travels the coast by barge.
Finally, it's loaded into a truck and sent here.
This new recycling centre has been created to handle the unique needs of ocean plastics.
[Worker] These are barrels.
[Reporter] With concern growing, many are calling for the plastic industry to do more.
[Dubois] A lot of these materials are contaminated
so we've set this centre up to manage these materials specifically
so that we can create specific products out of ocean plastics.
[Reporter] The final product, recycled pellets in need of a market.
[Dubois] The effects of plastic pollution are really being felt on a global scale
and this is putting a lot of pressure on companies to do something about the plastics
that they're using and selling for their products.
[Reporter] Although the B.C. effort appears impressive, here's a sobering statistic.
This year's entire cleanup project will likely gather about 400 tonnes of plastic
but over the course of this year alone
about 8 million tonnes will be added to the world's oceans.
On the beach, a message to the world's plastic polluters.
[Ignace] It is quite disturbing, garbage cans are made for a reason.
[Ignace] That's not supposed to be a garbage can.
In the end, all this hard work is only a temporary solution.
That's because as long as plastic waste is entering this ocean
it's going to end up in places like this.
Greg Rasmussen, CBC News, Estevan Point, B.C.