MONTREAL - The World Wildlife Fund has come up with a listing of the cleanest -- and the dirtiest -- shorefronts in Canada.
Here in Quebec the most and least littered areas are just a few kilometres away from each other.
Verdun's almost-pristine stretch of the St. Lawrence river near George O'Reilly park is one of the cleanest beaches in the country.
Every year the WWF organizes a coast-to-coast cleanup of beaches and tabulates the results.
At George O'Reilly park in 2010, volunteers picked up an average of 2 kg of trash ever kilometre, less than anywhere else in the province.
Ann Vezina visits the park as often as she can to drink in the view, and she enjoys the cleanliness.
"Oh this is, it's inspiring," said Vezina.
When CTV visited the park there was no litter to be found, despite the heavy foot and wheeled traffic.
The borough says it is honoured by the distinction, but says the shore doesn't clean itself.
"For the past 15 years we've had 500 volunteers take part in an annual shoreline clean up," said Gilles Baril.
It's a different story 20 km northwest in Pierrefonds, where Riviere a l'Orme has the dubious distinction of being the dirtiest place to be on the beach.
That's where 750 kg of litter had accumulated in 2010.
"Mainly cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic bags--and people know that they shouldn't be leaving without them and that they should pick them up but year after year we find them on our shoreline," said Marie-Claude Lemieux.
Overall the cleanest beach in Quebec still has a long way to go to catch up with the front runners in Ontario, Alberta and BC where less than 400 grams of trash were left to sit on the beach.
The worst in the country? The WWF says Sydenham Lake in Kingston, Ontario was covered in a stunning 5 metric tonnes of garbage.
