There’s a lot of beauty on the East Coast Trail, whales, icebergs, breathtaking coastal wilderness, but there is also this:
Of all the East Coast Trail paths, the negative consequences of human presence are most evident on Sugarloaf Path near St. John’s.
This beautiful trail follows the coastline as all trails do, but this particular trail has the bad luck of passing the St. John’s landfill along the way.
This area nicknamed ‘The Plastic Forest’ is just a small section of the trail but it’s hard to miss and gives all the hikers who pass through it a frown. The junk you see here is picked up from the landfill by the wind and blown onto the trail where it gets caught in the trees, or blows clear into the ocean to bother a sea creature.
As you can see in this second picture the litter is not just confined to the forest edge along the landfill, there’s also plenty of garbage that is blown onto the cliffs, very hard to clean up unless you want to risk life and limbs.
So, what can we do about it? The City of St. John’s and ECTA advise saying NO to plastic bags: