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A few years ago, a news story caught Ritvik Manicka’s attention. Then a Grade 8 student in Regina, Sask., he read about a University of Toronto ecologist who, along with a research team, was tossing plastic bottles with GPS trackers into the Great Lakes.

The ecologist, Chelsea Rochman, was studying how waste pollutes water bodies. Since 2017, her team has diverted more than a million microplastics from the Great Lakes, and has begun studying the movement of plastics through Toronto’s Don River and harbour. 

Manicka was inspired, and he reached out to Rochman. 

His family had moved to Milton, Ont. — partly because of its access to Canada’s top universities and researchers, he explained — giving him the chance to meet Rochman’s “Trash Team” and see their work in action. 

“I thought about what they were doing for some time and wondered, “Why don’t we do something like this in southern Ontario’s rivers?’ ” he told The Narwhal over Zoom. So much trash was created by people living in the suburbs of Toronto, in the headwaters of the major rivers pouring into several Great Lakes; could it be collected in the river and creek systems before it ends up in the lakes, Manicka wondered? 

He found the perfect partner on his first day of Grade 11 at Milton’s Bishop Reding Catholic Secondary School. 

In first period — physics — Manicka met Suraj Subrahmanyan. They shared stories from their summer vacations, as well as their scientific hopes and dreams. Both wanted to figure out how to help their community with science. After one physics class about how plastics move through water bodies, Manicka shared his idea with Subrahmanyan. 

“It felt like a pipe dream at the time because we didn’t have funding and these trackers are extremely expensive,” Subrahmanyan recalled. One water bottle with a GPS built inside cost $300. Plus they needed a subscription to the satellite tracking software the GPS was linked to.

The two Grade 11 boys applied for a $3,000 grant from conservation organization Ocean Wise and received the cheque in January. “That’s when it felt tangible and like something we could do,” Subrahmanyan said. 

Along with a $500 investment from their parents, and help from researchers at the universities of Toronto and New Hampshire, the pair decided to study the flow of plastics across three waterways: the Grand River, flowing from Kitchener-Waterloo to Lake Erie, the Credit River, connecting the Niagara Escarpment near Orangeville to Lake Ontario, and Bronte Creek, which runs through Hamilton and Halton Region to Lake Ontario. 

Last February, Manicka and Subrahmanyan found spots along each waterway — picking points where they run through major cities like Kitchener, Burlington, Mississauga and Brampton — and flung over a total of eight bright orange plastic water bottles with trackers. Every hour, they received two messages with detailed updates on where each bottle was, along with the different water levels, wind speeds, directions and temperatures the bottles encountered. The pair tracked the bottles for three months (until mid-May) before the batteries died. In that time, none of the bottles reached the lake; the longest distance one travelled was 20 kilometres, while the shortest was five. 

“What we found really surprising is that these bottles did not move in a linear fashion, that they did stop so many times,” Manicka said. “We noticed spots or areas where the bottles would stop. We called those hot spots, where waste was accumulating in the river systems.” The two friends talked about how one of the bottles stopped for a month and then travelled just 10 kilometres — proving that waste can be collected in the waterways leading to the lakes. 

Their findings are similar to what the University of Toronto Trash Team observed with their own tracking bottles in the Don River and connected harbour, Rochman, the ecologist, told The Narwhal over email. “I think among the most interesting things we observed is that woody debris in rivers retains plastic pollution in a big way, suggesting not all plastic in rivers makes its way to the lakes or oceans downstream,” she wrote.

While the research team’s study about the movement of plastic in Toronto’s rivers has not yet been published, Rochman said it, along with Manicka and Subrahmanyan’s research, proves “understanding the transport and fate of plastic helps us find places where plastics accumulate — which can be targeted for cleanup and other forms of mitigation.” 

Manicka and Subrahmanyan have started that conversation with Conservation Halton and the City of Burlington. They were also careful to collect seven out of eight bottles, with the help of not-for-profit group Wellington Water Watchers, and “not create additional litter,” Subrahmanyan said. The eighth bottle was in a spot too dangerous to access, surrounded by jagged rocks.   

“There’s this belief that once a piece of plastic enters the waterway, it’s over, it’s going to the lake,” Manicka said. “But, our study shows that we can do a lot to remove that piece of plastic.”

Cities can focus on the hot spots where waste collects in waterways, using litter traps in those spots and raising public awareness about the impacts of polluting, he said. When volunteers collected their bottles, the pair heard how they also found car tires, baby lotion bottles, soccer balls and more. 

“I feel like a lot of people are not aware that if they actually litter outside of their suburban houses, it enters these waterways, which then enters larger water bodies such as Lake Ontario, which is where they’re drinking from,” Subrahmanyan said. “And so these plastics can break down into microplastics and then into nanoplastics, and current water filtration systems can’t filter that out, and so that definitely warrants concern.” 

Rochman applauded the boys for their “leadership and initiative” and will help the pair, who have not yet finished high school, publish their findings in a paper of their own to present to cities, conservation authorities and researchers. Manicka wants to pursue a career in clean energy, while Subrahmanyan is interested in computer modelling.  

For now, they ask visitors to the Grand River to keep a lookout for the last bright orange bottle, adrift or stuck in the shrubbery. 

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Plastic pollution in the oceans has become an important societal problem, as plastics are the most common and persistent pollutants in oceans and beaches worldwide.

In the common imagination, plastic waste is often associated with bottles drifting in the ocean, fishing gear washing up on beaches or plastic bags that turtles mistake for jellyfish and eat.

But those larger particles are just the tip of the iceberg.

Smaller particles are also an important part of the problem. Plastic particles smaller than five millimetres are called microplastics. They may originate from deliberate design (such as cleaning agents or personal care products), breakdown of larger pieces of plastic or microfibers from textiles.

The impact of microplastics on the environment and human health is still being studied.

Microplastic collection on the Oregon Coast. Photo: Laura / Flickr

Arctic impact

If people assume the Arctic environment is unaffected by what humans discard into the oceans, they are wrong. The pristine waters of the Arctic Ocean are under silent threat by those particles as they drift along with the ocean currents over long distances.

Microplastic concentrations in the Arctic are expected to increase rapidly due to increasing freshwater input and the intensification of shipping traffic and resource development activities.

Plastics are showing up in Canada’s Arctic birds

Given the exceptional vulnerability of Arctic marine ecosystems, there is an urgent need to assess the distribution, pathways and fate of microplastics in the Arctic.

In a recent paper published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, we studied whether and how microplastics could be incorporated within the sea ice structure.

Microplastics within sea ice could impact the absorption of incident solar radiation. This affects sea ice albedo — how the ice reflects solar energy — one of the key properties of sea ice in terms of regulation of the heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere.

A sampling of microplastics from a freshwater stream in Florida. Photo: Florida Sea Grant / Flickr

Measuring albedo

Changes in sea ice albedo would have strong consequences on the annual cycle of sea ice growth and melt.

To test our hypothesis, we set up a microcosm study at the Sea-ice Environmental Research Facility at the University of Manitoba, an outdoor pool where we can grow sea ice.

Two sets of 12 microcosms, measuring one cubic metre, were made using galvanized aluminium pipes as frames and cotton bed sheets as walls.

The first set was used to measuring light levels, while the second set was used to collect sea ice samples. We manually added microplastic particles to monitor their incorporation into the sea ice as it grew. We used four different concentrations: control (no particles added), low, medium and high (about 120, 380 and 1,200 particles per litre, respectively).

We used a dye called Nile red to follow the microplastics as the ice froze. Under a fluorescent light, dye caused microplastics to glow, allowing us to see how sea ice concentrates microplastics within its structure and, once incorporated, how those particles remain in the ice matrix.

We found high concentrations of particles at the sea ice surface, due to the particles’ buoyancy and to the rapid formation of ice crystals, trapping the particles as ice coalesces into a firm ice layer.

Albedo is a measurement of how well a surface reflects sunlight. Sea ice that is darker, due to the accumulation of pollution particles or microplastics, absorbs more sunlight. Photo: Alec Cooks / Unsplash

Although microplastics did not affect the sea ice growth rates, we found distinct changes in sea ice albedo in response to medium and high concentrations of microplastics microcosms.

To determine the real-world impact of our observations, we also measured microplastic concentrations from various sea ice samples collected in the Gulf of Bothnia (Baltic Sea).

We observed microplastic concentrations similar to what is observed in the Arctic Ocean (8 to 41 particles per litre), but much lower than the concentration in our microcosms experiment. At those concentrations, we do not expect microplastic incorporation to have any impact on sea ice albedo.

For regions with higher microplastic concentrations, or should microplastic concentration increase, we expect sea-ice properties might change.

These changes would affect most notably albedo, but also photochemical and photo-biological processes occurring in sea ice, such as light availability for algae living at the bottom of the ice cover, with potential impacts on the base of the Arctic food web.

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The federal government has taken action recently to reduce the amount of plastic waste found on land and in oceans, rivers and lakes.

In June, for example, it said it would ban single-use plastics by 2021. “It is tough to explain to your children why dead whales are washing up on our beaches with their stomachs jammed packed with plastic bags,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commented at the time.

Despite this progress, one of the main plastic polluters — shellfish aquaculture — continues to threaten marine ecosystems.

Coastal British Columbia is rugged and jagged. Its drowned fjords are home to wild salmon and the ecosystems that depend on them. Tucked away between Vancouver and Denman islands is Baynes Sound, a serene inland sea, home to sea mammals, globally important duck and bird populations, and a biological diversity unmatched along our coast.

So unique is this ecosystem that, 20 years ago, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) recommended regions within this area be set aside as protected areas.

Threats to the sound include increased tourism, urbanization and an-as-yet-unregulated seaweed harvest. The greatest threat, however, is an expanding shellfish industry that provides a continual source of plastics to the sound.

Shellfish aquaculture

For the past 14 years, community beach cleanups have measured the plastic in Baynes Sound. An astonishing four to six tonnes of plastic debris, including anti-predator netting, plastics trays, ropes and styrofoam, is collected from the beaches annually. Now polyvinyl chloride (PVC) piping, used for the farming of geoducks is also being washed ashore.

Geoducks are native to the coastal waters of western Canada and the northwest United States. They are the largest burrowing clam in the world and are a delicacy in China, Korea, Japan and the Pacific Northwest. Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture / Flickr

In 2017, the DFO gave the West Coast shellfish industry a green light to expand its farming practices to include the lucrative geoduck, a luxury protein used in sashimi, to meet the demand from Hong Kong and the rest of China.

Geoducks (pronounced “gooey ducks”) are large salt-water clams, found naturally along the Pacific coast. Sales of farmed geoduck to this select market netted close to $56 million in 2017.

Geoduck Romesco at Taylor’s Shellfish in Seattle, Washington. Photo: T.Tseng / Flickr

Farming them involves placing juvenile geoducks into rows and rows of 18-inch long segments of PVC piping, planted vertically into the intertidal sediments, at a density of one pipe per square foot. Nets are secured with elastic bands over the pipe to protect the immature geoduck.

But the pipes become loose within days, especially after storm events, and the beach becomes littered with the plastic netting, elastics and pipes. Wave action and ultraviolet light from the sun degrade the pipes, creating fragments and then microplastics (items smaller than five millimetres in diametre) that further pollute the marine environment.

Ecosystem and health impacts

PVC is one of the most common plastic polymers in use, and its breakdown can damage ecosystem and human health.

The particles may harm invertebrates, fish, seabirds and other organisms that consume them. The chemicals in the plastic debris, including plasticizers, phthalates, flame retardants and stabilizers, can leach out of particles and have the potential to harm marine organisms. Finally, the pipe fragments can also act as a substrate, providing pathogenic marine organisms and parasites in near-shore environments with a place to grow and multiply.

“Canadians know first-hand the impacts of plastic pollution, and are tired of seeing their beaches, parks, streets and shorelines littered with plastic waste,” Trudeau said in a statement after he announced the single-use plastics ban.“We have a responsibility to work with our partners to reduce plastic pollution, protect the environment and create jobs and grow our economy. We owe it to our kids to keep the environment clean and safe for generations to come.”

So, why the paradox?

The government says it’s intent on protecting at least 10 per cent of our coastal ecosystems and reducing the threat of plastics to our marine environments. Yet the industry, which is managed by our federal government, has been given permission to introduce hazardous plastics into one of B.C.‘s most sensitive ecosystems.

Geoduck planting at the Deep Bay Marine Field Station biological research facility, operated by Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Shellfish Research in Bayes Sound, B.C. Photo: VIUDeepBay / Flickr

The ban on plastic holds consumers accountable. It targets their behaviour and will force change. But this is only part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is the industry practice of discharging dangerous plastics into sensitive ecosystems. Government is regulating a change in consumer behaviour. Why not do the same for industry?

If the government’s goal is to protect these sensitive marine ecosystems, it needs to stop the flow of plastics from industrial sources including the unregulated shellfish industry. The economic gain of farming sashimi for a select market is not worth the environmental cost.

Shelley McKeachie, a founding member, past chair and director of the Association for Denman Island Marine Stewards, co-authored this article.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Brianne Miller wanted to help protect whales. So she opened a grocery store.

That makes more sense if you see it through her eyes: she saw that at the root of many ecological problems is our global supply chains. From plastic pollution and ocean noise to climate change and ocean acidification, marine environments are being hammered by the way we transport goods for consumption halfway around the world.

Miller figured that the best way to disrupt that damaging system was to open her own store that would minimize the harms of our traditional supply chains. The store, Nada, opens soon in Vancouver, offering package-free groceries, zero-waste products, focusing on short, uncomplicated supply chains.

It’s not perfect; Miller acknowledges that, operating in the modern world, she and her cofounders have have had to make compromises during construction and in sourcing their products. But as a way of saving the whales by opening a grocery store, it’s a strong start.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where did this idea come from?

I come from the marine biology world, studying coral reefs and tropical fish, and then ultimately marine mammals, which is the work I did for my Master’s. I really got to see firsthand how global and widespread the plastic pollution problem was.

It was very eye-opening; every single beach that I’ve been on has been covered in plastic and I don’t think I’ve been on a single dive where I haven’t seen some sort of plastic in the water.

I guess for me on the personal side of things, in the field that I was in, there was definitely a lot of doom and gloom. I personally felt like we know a lot about what the problems are, but I wanted to do something to try and tackle the problem at the source as opposed to dealing with the consequences on the other end.

How did the idea change over the course of your planning?

I started out just wanting to open a store that focused more on socially responsible sourcing, a store that really looked at the supply chain. That’s where I realized that every problem I was seeing with the oceans was somehow tied to our food system. I’ve done work now on underwater noise and obviously that’s directly related to our global economy and how we’re shipping products around the world.

Farming is another big one that has a huge impact on the oceans, all the agricultural pesticides and fertilizers that run off and create dead zones. Overfishing and bycatch are obviously huge ones.

So I was like, ‘man, everything is somehow related to food.’

And so that’s where the idea for the store started. It was more of a store that thought about all these things in terms of how it’s sourced and what it sold. And then over time I learned more about the packaging problem, and plastic pollution in general and realized that that was a big component to this conversation as well.

You’ve taken a different approach with the actual construction of your building. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

The building is amazing. It’s a LEED Gold certified building, so the base building itself is actually built to the highest environmental standards that exist. It uses things like geothermal heat, it has UV-resistant windows, the way that the awnings and windows are designed is to let in the maximum amount of light. Everything is really energy efficient.

We’re trying to do as green of a buildout as we can. We are doing a ton of sourcing of secondhand and reclaimed materials. Everything from all of our fixtures to our café and snack bar, a lot of the wood items, we’ve been able to reuse a lot of drywall and pressboard. There was one big wall that needed to come down; instead of just demolishing it, which is what normally happens, we deconstructed it, so it came out in pieces and we were essentially able to reuse the entire wall to build all of our walls. We didn’t even need to purchase any new studs, we didn’t need to buy any new insulation, even the screws were able to be reused. It just takes time to handle it properly.

There are so many things that have stories…I like knowing where they came from.

How will Nada actually work?

The idea is that people will come into the store, they will grab their baskets and go to the tare station, or the weighing station. We are encouraging people to bring their own containers to refill with food. We have a bring-your-own-container policy that essentially outlines what is okay to bring, but essentially anything that’s clean — so that could be a Ziploc bag, could be a Tupperware container, could be a Mason jar a cloth bag, whatever people have on hand.

Essentially anything that anyone can use one more time before it gets chucked in the recycling or the garbage is a win in our book.

That ties into the accessibility conversation — we’re trying to make something very accessible to many people. A lot of people think ‘zero waste’ and they think of these really pretty Instagram accounts that have all of these fancy jars.

It doesn’t need to be like that at all.

Then we have a digital system that we’ve developed to make package-free grocery shopping faster and more efficient.

Other than that it’s like a normal grocery store without packaging. We have baked goods. We have produce. We have lots of bulk liquids — which are really hard to find — things like olive oil, honey, molasses, vinegar. We have a lot of zero-waste items — anything that’s a long lasting alternative to single-use disposable plastics — so stainless steel straws, containers, cloth bulk bags and cloth produce bags.

We’ve got compostable toothbrushes and toothpaste in refillable jars, laundry soap, dish soap — kind of everything you could ever need.

A huge part of what we do is actually supply chain innovation. What we’ve done is develop bins and a back-of-house system that makes that a little bit more efficient as well. We’ve designed bins that go directly to shelf — so we in many instances will send the supplier a bin, and then they refill the container. When it’s empty it goes to the back to get cleaned and then goes back to the supplier to refill again.

Miller and Carr in a pop-up shop at Patagonia in Vancouver. Photo by Amanda Palmer.

What are the things you’re most excited Nada won’t sell?

I mean, everything [laughs]…I want to say probably 90 or 95 per cent of the products that we sell are products that are traditionally packaged so we’re working with suppliers to reduce packaging, which is requiring a lot collaboration, obviously.

But there are some items that we’re working on that are really hard to get without packaging.

Things like chips and crackers are a really tricky one because of the freshness. Any kind of snack food is really tricky, but we do have a lot of awesome local suppliers. So we do have two or three local cracker suppliers that do inventory drops more often so things stay fresh, we’re working with a chip company, but instead of doing package-free chips all the time, we’ll probably do a fresh chip drop. It’s going to be an ongoing thing, sourcing new products, expanding what we offer.

What are the things that you’ve had to compromise on?

There were things like tile, for example; we searched high and low for used, simple white subway tile and we spent weeks looking for it and couldn’t find any. And so we ended up getting new tile. The refrigeration is something we actually decided to not get used, because it was near impossible to find matching pieces, and ones that fit the space. And then also we wanted to get energy-efficient appliances, and I wanted the warranties that came with them as well. There were little odds and ends — like the countertops had to be custom-made — but again, choosing to pay a little bit more for like a product that’s really long lasting and durable.

What are some of the barriers on the consumer side to get people to buy into this?

It’s a whole conversation about accessibility and price. Because of the way that we source — we source really high quality, good-for-people-and-planet products that are inherently more expensive to make — a lot of what we buy today, it doesn’t really reflect the true cost of that food.

So yes, the products that we sell are inherently a higher price point than a conventional grocery store, something like a No Frills. If you’re getting flour from No Frills, obviously ours is going to be more expensive, but we’re sourcing a local, organic made-in-B.C. flour. I guess with bulk items especially, that’s where there really is not a lot of transparency in any other grocery store — you’re lucky if they’ll say the country that a product comes from, but there’s zero information about where a bulk product comes from.

A lot of the barriers are perceived barriers — that it takes a lot of time and energy to shop this way. And it definitely does take time, but it’s just habit building like anything else, right? We all walk out the door with our phones every day and you don’t forget your phone. It’s a shift in habit to remember to grab your reusable bag that has a reusable napkin and a straw and some containers in it. It’s definitely not as complicated as people think, and that’s what our store is there for — to demonstrate that it really isn’t that complicated.

For example, we’ll have containers for free and containers for sale. If anyone comes into the store and doesn’t have containers on them, they have lots of different options so they can buy Nada-branded containers, they can buy upcycled containers or we’ll have free containers as well like normal recycling — things like glass spaghetti jars that will be sanitized.

If you don’t live in a city that has a place that you can go like Nada, what can you do to reduce packaging in your own life?

We always suggest that people start really small. Often people get caught up in wanting to do this whole zero-waste thing, and they try to tackle many things at the same time.

What we recommend is actually to start with one thing and then adding on from there. One of the first things that you can do is a waste audit. It’s essentially like a very quick look at the garbage you’re actually throwing out, like, ‘oh I’ve got lots of coffee cups, or lots of napkins, lots of bags’ or whatever it happens to be, and starting to tackle that one item you are throwing out the most.

Nada is opening soon at 675 East Broadway in Vancouver, B.C. Check the Nada site for details.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.