Alongside preventative actions like reducing plastic production and improving waste management, cleanup plays a valuable role in tackling plastic pollution.
Cleanup removes legacy pollution from the environment, prevents litter in the watershed from entering Lake Ontario and its connected tributaries, and provides a unique opportunity to collect long-term monitoring data while connecting with like-minded community members to motivate and inform solutions to prevent future pollution.
Join our Urban Litter Challenge
Hosted in neighbourhoods in and around the Toronto area, our Urban Litter Challenge prevents litter in our watershed from entering Lake Ontario and its connected tributaries while collecting important monitoring data on what litter items we remove.
- When and Where: The Urban Litter Challenge is a series of multiple cleanups hosted by our volunteer site leads over a single weekend in September. Locations vary each year.
- How it works: During each cleanup, participants form small teams and clean local parks, ravines, and city sidewalks while filling out data cards to record the type and amount of litter collected. This data contributes nationally to the Ocean Wise Shoreline Cleanup and globally to the Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup®.
- How to join: Visit our events calendar in early September to see when and where our Urban Litter Challenge cleanups are being hosted.
Want to clean up another time of the year? There are many great local organizations we often collaborate with. You can also lead your own cleanup with the Ocean Wise Shoreline Cleanup. Please email us for more details.
Results
Detailed data is available to download from the Ocean Conservancy TIDES database.
Event Recaps
