Meet the diver who’s pulled more than 27,000 kg of trash from B.C. lakes

Henry Wang estimates estimates he and his friends have pulled up more than 27,000 kilograms (59,000 pounds) of refuse over nearly 250 dives in the last decade.

Forget the coral reefs, sunken ships and exotic marine life, B.C. scuba diver Henry Wang is only interested in one thing: Garbage.

Wang has been diving in bodies of water around the Lower Mainland for more than a decade on the hunt for trash, and estimates in that time he’s pulled up more than 27,000 kilograms (59,000 pounds) of refuse.

On Monday, he was at Abbotsford’s Albert Dyck Park, where he said he pulled up more than 30 kilograms (67 pounds) of garbage.

“All of these things are not supposed to be in the water column and they do degrade over time,” he told Global News. “They are not supposed to be in the water, so it’s a good idea to take them out.”

Wang got into scuba diving in 2004, and quickly levelled up his skills, taking on cave diving and eventually operating a dive shop.

He sold the shop in 2013, around the same time one of his dive partners asked if he wanted to start exploring lakes.

On a dive trip to Buntzen Lake in Anmore, the realized the body of water was packed with garbage. They came back with more gear, and pulled out an estimated 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds) of trash.

In the decade since, he estimates he and his friends have done close to 250 cleanup dives, and recovered everything from run of the mill trash like beer cans and lighters to a $3,000 boat propeller and a 110-year-old piece of logging equipment.