Meet the 12-year-old who found a better way to keep beaches clean

Written By Peter Allan

Dane Currie with a Painted turtle hatchling. Three times a year, the 12-year-old from St Catharines, Ont., and his classmates help turtles cross busy roads so they can lay their eggs or find water for the first time as hatchlings. Photo by: Lindsay Currie

 

By Patricia Lane & Dane Currie

Dane Currie is cleaning up for good. The 12-year-old from St Catharines, Ont., and his Thursday classmates, the Green Herons, got tired of doing beach clean-ups, so they figured out how to stop pollution at the source. They are 2025 winners of the I-SEA National Youth Climate Activism Award for their Earth Day video.

Tell us about your clean-up project.

Jordan Harbour on Lake Ontario is a dumping site for garbage by local fishermen and visitors to the beach, so for four years we tried to clean it up. After pulling out hundreds of bags of trash, we were frustrated! Could we stop it from happening in the first place?

We asked the town and the conservation authority, but since it wasn’t their land, there was little they could do. So we installed garbage bins, compostable bag dispensers, and Niagara Waste gave us a discount on a dumpster to store the waste. We made signs explaining our work and asked the community to help keep trash out of Lake Ontario.

Six weeks later, the beach area is still clean. We hope to keep making a positive impact and keep it funded when there is more traffic in summer.

What are other Green Heron projects?

A local school offered to replace a non-native garden with native plants. We empower their kindergarten students to get involved in the swap and teach seed collecting, soil and winter sowing. They are learning how to grow our native plants.

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Peter Allan
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