Here are some of the strangest items found in Winnipeg’s Seine River

An environmental non-profit that seeks to protect the Seine River and its surrounding natural areas is sharing some of the disturbing and downright strange items fished out the waterway this summer.

Save Our Seine’s Summer River Keeper Team spends the warmest months collecting garbage and debris, clearing fallen trees and log jams, maintaining trails and removing invasive species.

After 11 weeks trolling the waters, the organization is sharing some of the team’s finds.

“They did the entire river through Winnipeg twice,” explained Ryan Palmquist, managing director of Save Our Seine River Environment Inc.

“During that time, they pulled out of over 100 bags of garbage, 15 shopping carts, 80 pieces of treated wood and countless other individual, small objects ranging from knives to bicycles to pieces of cars, car tires and anything else you can imagine.”

Team members regularly filled canoes up with the not-so buried treasures, while keeping the river accessible and usable in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way for the entire summer season, Palmquist said.

He adds the greenway was essentially a large-scale dumping ground prior to the organization’s founding in the ‘90s.

Since it began caring for the area, it has substantially improved.

“However, there still is a recurring renewal of garbage in the river every year,” he said. “If this work were to stop for any given year, we would see things maybe not return to quite as bad as they were, but they would start in that direction.”

Illegal dumping continues to be a blight on the waterway. To crack down, the organization is launching a public study into some of the sources of the trash that plagues the river, and the underlying reasons why those who dump their garbage do so.

The goal is to one day make the organization obsolete, Palmquist said.

- With files from CTV’s Kimberly Rio Wertman