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Lake Ontario’s plastic soup

From the shore of Lake Ontario, it’s impossible to tell just how serious our plastic pollution problem has become. 

To comprehend the mess we’ve made, we’d have to drag a fine-mesh net across the water’s surface and look closely at what it pulled up. That’s exactly what a team of scientists led by Sherri Mason and the NGO 5 Gyres did in the summers of 2012 and 2013, and their discoveries are very disturbing.

Travelling across all five Great Lakes, they found an average of 43,000 microplastic particles in every square kilometre of lake surface. 

Some of the lowest concentrations were understandably in Lake Superior and Lake Huron, far from major urban centres. But when they sampled certain areas of Lake Ontario, the levels jumped to as high as 1.1 million particles per square km. 

Just like the infamous garbage patches of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, our own backyard has been turned into a plastic soup – only our lakes have even higher concentrations of plastics than the biggest ocean garbage patches.

I had the opportunity to join 5 Gyres expeditions in 2012 and 2013 to both the Western Pacific Garbage Patch and Lake Ontario, and the most frustrating thing about the experience was realizing just how unnecessary the plastic polluting our water really is.

So much of what enters the lakes – plastic bags, balloons, cigarette butts, excess packaging, drink bottles, coffee stir sticks – is used for mere seconds or minutes but remains in the environment for hundreds of years.

Of all the different types of plastic we found, few are as gratuitous and dangerous to aquatic life as microbeads – the tiny balls of plastic commonly found in exfoliating body washes, facial scrubs, shampoos, hand sanitizers and toothpaste. 

Often made of polypropylene or polyethylene, microbeads are not biodegradable and range in size from 0.0004 to 1.24 mm. They are simply too small to be filtered out by most wastewater treatment plants and flow straight from your drain into local lakes and rivers. 

Some of these cleansers and body washes contain over 330,000 beads in a single tube. So it’s no surprise that since the 1990s, when they first became popular, billions of them have ended up in the Great Lakes, where they will float for many more decades until they wash ashore on a local beach or are ingested by wildlife. 

Unlike other plastics that can take months or years to break down into small pieces, multicoloured microbeads are already exactly the same size and colour as many fish eggs and look just like food to a wide range of creatures from birds to invertebrates, mammals and fish.

When animals ingest plastic, it gives them a false sense of being full, clogs their stomachs and even chokes some of them to death.

Worse, plastics act like a sponge, sucking up toxins and pollutants that have accumulated in the Great Lakes, including PCBs, pesticides, flame retardants and motor oil. 

As smaller creatures eat polluted microbeads, these contaminants work their way up the food chain, becoming more and more concentrated. At the top of the food chain are humans, who are indirectly eating our own garbage and pollution when we eat certain fish or marine life.

Thankfully, both government and industry are beginning to become aware of this absurd situation and are taking steps to phase out microbeads across North America. 

Illinois recently became the first U.S. state to outright ban personal-care products that contain microbeads, and at least nine other states are considering similar laws.

Ontario just put forward a proposal to ban microbeads across the province, and similar legislation is being put forward at the federal level. The goal is to have binding legislation in place by the end of 2015 in Ontario and federally by 2017. Companies such as L’Oréal, the Body Shop and Johnson & Johnson have also responded to public pressure and committed to phasing out plastic microbeads by the end of 2015. Procter & Gamble says it will do so by 2017.

These are important steps, but there’s still a lot more we can all be doing to help. 

Even if bans are passed, companies will be given a multi-year window to phase out these products, and plastic microbeads might not be completely off shelves until as late as 2019. In the meantime, consumers should consider not purchasing products containing plastic microbeads. Watch out for the label “microbeads” or the ingredients polypropylene and polyethylene on the back of products you aren’t sure about. The sooner we stop buying these, the sooner the companies will phase them out.

If you swear by the exfoliating powers of microbeads, there are other great options available. 

Some brands already use natural alternatives like apricot seeds, jojoba beads, crushed walnut shells and cocoa powder. The cosmetics industry is looking into even cheaper options like sand.

But just because a ban on microbeads is on its way doesn’t mean the plastic pollution problem is solved. Microbeads are but one small part of a global marine plastic pollution problem that is bound to keep getting worse. Global production of plastic has been on the rise for more than 50 years and in 2013 reached an all-time high of 299 million tons of plastic produced. Every year 10 to 20 million tons of plastic will enter the oceans. 

The average European and North American now uses over 100 kilograms of disposable plastic per year, mostly in the form of packaging. The average in Asia is just 20 kilograms per person, but this figure is rapidly rising as economies expand. 

One big concern is that developing countries are adopting disposable plastic lifestyles with little capacity to properly dispose of plastic waste, let alone recycle.

There have recently been some interesting attempts to build water vacuums and filters that can suck up floating pieces of plastic from our lakes and oceans, but these designs are very difficult to implement on a wide enough scale to permanently solve the problem. 

Unfortunately, because plastic breaks down into such small fragments, it’s also proving impossible to scoop up plastic particles without killing tiny zooplankton, the creatures that help form the base of every aquatic food chain.

Clearly, the only effective solution to this problem is to stop the flow of plastic. 

Canadians are good recyclers from a global perspective. (About 27 per cent of our total solid waste is recycled.) Still, most of the plastic we consume eventually ends up in landfills or somewhere worse. 

We are all consumers of disposable plastic, and every time you use reusable water bottles, coffee thermoses, utensils, bags or food containers, you are making a difference. 

Plastics have been part of our daily lives for just 50 years, yet that was more than enough time to turn our lakes and oceans into a plastic soup. 

I don’t want to imagine what our lakes and oceans will look like in another 50 years if we don’t make significant changes.

Alex Mifflin and his brother Tyler Mifflin are hosts and creators of the award-winning eco-adventure television series The Water Brothers on TVO.

Don’t miss: Scrub scrutiny – The exfoliating cleanser guide.

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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