Taking a look at one of the Sea Bins at the Toronto Zoo! We’re seeing more of these all over the place… Muskoka too?

We imagine many of you have spent some of your ‘pandemic hours’ out on neighbourhood walks, or exploring further afield in your community.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably noticed, and grimaced, at the amount of litter on some of those hikes - plastic bottles, snack wrappers, paper cups, serviettes, cigarette butts and… masks, anyone? (More on that soon…).

In a previous life, Sean wrote a great deal about the most effective ways to measure reduction in use of these types of single use items. He bored his colleagues. It often boiled down to litter (but with a lot of expletives).

Practically speaking, litter tells us almost everything we need to know about how these materials challenge our waste systems. Small, lightweight, challenging to sort and overwhelming in volume, it is small single use items which most often end up as litter. Municipalities use ‘litter audits’ to determine what materials plague their streets, but citizen science has yielded perhaps the best publicly available data on litter in our communities.

The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is a tremendous initiative that allows people to get involved in ‘greening’ their community while contributing to a long-term data set on the physical pollutants found in our natural environment. Shockingly, their ‘top ten’ list of offenders remains an easy thing to bet on.

But there are plenty of reasons for optimism in the battle against litter. Individuals can easily reduce their own footprint by choosing reusable items whenever possible.

Around Toronto, two local solutions to litter in the watercourse(s) here have sprung up in recent years:

Check out the old pipe being used for waste collection!

1: Fishing Line collection in local fishing spots - seemingly led by these great folks here, at the Toronto Urban Fishing Ambassador.

2: The installation of ‘Sea Bins’ around Toronto. These neat devices act as vacuum cleaners for the water, sucking up and storing small bits of plastic or other litter that can be nearly impossible to get out of a lake or river. In Toronto, this initiative began at the Toronto Harbour, but Sean recently noticed them at the Zoo! The Sea Bins - and many other amazing projects to help increase waste literacy - are projects of the Rochman Lab at U of T.

So hey, don’t despair when you see something disappointing, waste-wise, on your next hike. Look for a local way to get involved and help clean up… and hit us up in the comments or on the socials to let us know what you’re doing in your community!

SIDE NOTES & DEFINITIONS:

Waste Audit: quite literally, someone sorting through piles of garbage and recycling, and sorting the material into categories. This composition data helps governments and industry plan for and respond to challenges in waste management. Nerds (like us) looking for great reading should start here.

Litter Audit: the same, but with litter!

Also in the Thousand Islands: Fishing Line Removal - check it out here, and here!

FINAL SIDE NOTE FOR SMOKERS:

Cigarette butts are a problem. Smokers, keep a doob-tube for your butts, and dispose of them properly. Most Cigarette filters are plastic, and they are the number one littered item… literally everywhere.

That’s it for now, talk soon!

-Hurley.

Notes on Plastic Litter... and Hope.