Exploring the hidden litter in our communities
A decade ago, to my ten-year-old eyes, they would have looked like secret treasures hiding amidst the shore. Shards of pink, a deformed green sphere, a tiny piece of blue like an arrowhead, all transformed into ancient history waiting to be discovered, or the mysterious belongings of mermaids. Now, I look at them with different eyes. The origins of these small plastic fragments are a mystery. They might have been a child’s toy that slipped into the lake and degraded into broken pieces, and before that, tiny pre-production plastic pellets waiting in the factory to be melted down and formed.
It’s easy to miss or walk right past them, even today, during a cleanup for the Urban Litter Challenge, when there is so much other litter to collect. There is a plastic water bottle, tangled in the shoreline plant; there is a neon green pool float forgotten in the trees. Even cigarette butts, lying between tall blades of grass or scattered by park benches, are easier to spot.
Everywhere, there is more litter than meets the eye, and everywhere, each item removed makes a difference. A small plastic that we pick up might have been swallowed by wildlife. Every cigarette butt removed is one that doesn’t enter the water, where its pollutants could spread as toxins to fish in the lake.
Roots of the Urban Litter Challenge
From one large cleanup in 2019, the Urban Litter Challenge has grown into a weekend of community cleanups across the Greater Toronto Area. U of T Trash Team volunteer site leads select a local park to lead a cleanup at, while community volunteers learn about the sources of litter in their community and collect data that sparks local to global impact through the Ocean Wise Shoreline Cleanup and Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup®.
Cleanups Across the Community
This year, twelve cleanups spanned the GTA, as far west as the waterside A.E. Crookes Park in Mississauga extending eastward to the forests of Morningside Park in Scarborough.
They also included downtown Toronto locations, like Dunbat skate park in Alexandra Park where volunteers collected 2,045 cigarette butts. Cigarette butts were also found in high numbers at McCaul-Orde Park, with just over 2,200! Over at Trinity Bellwoods Park, volunteers collected over 300 pieces of plastic confetti, the leftovers of previous celebrations glimmering in the dirt.
A week later, as the site leads shared stories from their cleanups, the memories that remained were often observations on the trash collected, but even more often about the people who showed up to help. At HTO Park, volunteers ran into WWF-Canada staff wrapping up from another cleanup nearby. Grange Park had volunteers joining to help after hearing about the event through a microplastics conference held just a week beforehand. A former U of T Trash Team volunteer and researcher, now a math teacher, reconnected and joined the crew at Trinity Bellwoods.
Running my own cleanup at A.E. Crookes Park, I wondered about our turnout. We only had eight registrations, but it was, after all, Sunday morning, and I assumed some of those eight would answer the call of a warm bed. We’d have five, or maybe three, and, in the worst-case scenario it would be a warm morning picking up litter with the friend who hosted the cleanup with me.
To my delight, 15 people came! For half an hour, a high school student sat with me in the sand, sifting through our little square of shoreline finding microplastics in the form of pellets. Two women came back to the meeting site twenty minutes late, hauling several garbage bags full of pop cans. As we counted up the litter, she and her friends went to their car, and returned with cookies and mango juice to share, a cherished act of kindness to cap off a day of protecting our watershed.
Every Piece Counts
Looking at the results for the weekend, it would be easy to dwell on the littering behaviours of others, but that is only part of the story. It’s easy to lose sight of the animals –including us– and plants whose tiny, glimmering lives unfold on this earth. It’s even easier to forget about the people who can and do act on that litter. What stays with me is this: the only reason we know anything about how much plastic pollution and waste there is in our world is the people who have dedicated their education, careers, and their lives to collecting data and working on solutions.
We now have a snapshot of plastic pollution from our Urban Litter Challenge cleanup weekend because of the 158 community volunteers who took a single weekend morning collect that data all while removing it from the environment. Every action we take makes a difference, and every piece counts.
Blog written by Lilianna Xing (she/her), a third year student at U of T St. George studying Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Peace Conflict & Justice. She loves bugs and teaching about ecology!