Montreal doctors' breakthrough discovery about causes of cerebral palsy giving hope
A breakthrough discovery made by doctors at the Montreal Children's Hospital about the causes of cerebral palsy is giving new hope to one West Island family.
As the sun shimmers on Toronto’s Harbourfront, pedestrians enjoying a summer saunter are largely unaware of what’s lurking just along the water’s edge.
Ten sea bins have been deployed by the self-named University of Toronto Trash Team. If you manage to find one of their baskets in the water, there’s a good chance it's barely staying buoyant. That’s because it's weighed down by the contents inside.
University of Toronto (U of T) Environmental science student Ishani Sharma pulls out a syringe followed by an onslaught of plastic. From food wrappers to beverage containers, to bottle caps and cups, each piece reveals the harsh reality: Lake Ontario is under siege.
The bigger pieces are easy to track and record. The shocking discovery, researchers say, is the amount of microplastics in each bin. As she dumps a bin onto a tarp, Sharma estimates it’s only a quarter full.
“In this pile, it's probably close to1,600 -- 1,600 microplastics that we can count," she told CTV National News.
That tally is from one single bucket, after only 24 hours in the water. There’s another nine baskets along Toronto’s inner harbour. That’s more than 10,000 pieces of microplastic pulled out each day from just 10 bins, no bigger than a basketball net in diameter.
The program's co-founder, Chelsea Rochman, is an Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the U of T. She says they’ve been pulling “game fish” out of Lake Ontario. When they cut the fish open, the mounting ecological crisis is brought sharply into focus.
“We find hundreds of pieces of plastic in the gut of one fish and we also find pieces of microplastic in the fillet -- the part that you and I eat,” Rochman said. “So some people are eating microplastic.”
But it doesn’t end there. Rochman works with an engineering lab at U of T that tests samples from local drinking water plants.
"We have looked for microplastics in that drinking water, we do find microplastics in drinking water. Around the world more and more documents are coming out and showing that microplastics are in our drinking water," she told CTV News.
Nearly every piece of microplastic pulled out of Lake Ontario is tracked and recorded by the dozens of U of T students participating in the study.
From food wrappers to water bottles, to caps and cups, each piece reveals the harsh reality of plastic pollution.
After flushing out as many of the microplastic pieces as possible, student Zoe Ungku Fa’iz details how she tackles the tedious work.
"We’ll sort through all these tiny pieces, and categorize them from plastic pellet, to pieces of foam, fragments, or even sometimes we’ll still find large pieces of (plastic) film," she explained.
The so-called trash team have traced thousands of these pea sized plastics to the drains on factory floors, some of which are cities away.
“When it becomes part of the storm water system, that drain leads directly to a river that leads directly to the lake,” says Rochman.
Everything pulled out of the lake by the team is shared with government officials, as the team pushes their evidence to bring legislative change.
The Canadian Government banned tiny beads found in soap products in 2018, though with no federal regulations on microplastics or the industries producing them, the Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault admitted to CTV News that more needs to be done.
“There are things we need to be doing in collaboration with other levels of government," Guilbeault said.
He added that “through the Canadian Council for the ministers of the environment, we are working on a joint strategy to fight plastic pollution, but I agree microplastics are an issue and that's an issue we want to tackle.”
Nearly every piece of microplastic pulled out of Lake Ontario is recorded.
Speaking one-on-one with CTV News, Guilbeault also noted the federal government’s upcoming ban on some single use plastics, while it may help, won’t solve the growing concern around microplastics.
The growing problem in the Great Lakes may be harder for the public to ignore in Toronto.
Trash team member and visual artist Emily Chudnovsky is collecting the waste pulled out by the team each day. But instead of using the bigger pieces, she’ll be piecing together the microplastics for a large sculpture that will float along the Harbourfront for all to see.
Chudnovsky hopes “it will make people think about the small as well as the big (plastics)."
"Here at the trash team we’re taking a sample of a much larger problem and collecting the data. I hope my sculpture will cause people to stop, pause and take notice," she said.
A breakthrough discovery made by doctors at the Montreal Children's Hospital about the causes of cerebral palsy is giving new hope to one West Island family.
Warnings of up to 60 millimetres of rain and other alerts have been issued for seven Canadian provinces and one territory ahead of the Easter weekend.
An Ontario man who built a garage on his property has been locked in a battle with his electricity provider for a year and half over a severed power line.
Jameek Lowery was among more than 330 Black people who died after police stopped them with tactics that aren’t supposed to be deadly, like physical restraint and use of stun guns, The Associated Press found.
It was a typical Tuesday for Mabel Beharrell, 84, until she got the call that would turn her world upside down. Her teenaged grandson was in trouble and needed her help.
The Canada Revenue Agency announced Thursday it will not require 'bare trust' reporting from Canadians that it introduced for the 2024 tax season, just four days before the April 2 deadline.
The estate of minimalist contemporary artist Donald Judd filed a lawsuit against Kardashian this week, claiming the fashion and beauty mogul promoted 'cheap knockoffs' of his furniture designs.
The spring allergy season has started early in many parts of Canada, with high levels of pollen in some cities already. Experts weigh in on which areas have it worse so far this season.
Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the seminal TV miniseries 'Roots,' has died. He was 87.
B.C. conservation officers recently seized a nine-foot-long Burmese python from a home in Chilliwack.
A New Brunswicker will go to bed Thursday night much richer than he was Wednesday after collecting on a winning lottery ticket he let sit on his bedroom dresser for nearly a year.
The Ontario government is introducing changes to auto-insurance, but some experts say the move is ill-advised.
A Toronto restaurant introduced a surprising new rule that reduced the cost of a meal and raised the salaries of staff.
Newfoundland’s unique version of the Pine Marten has grown out of its threatened designation.
A Toronto man is out $12,000 after falling victim to a deepfake cryptocurrency scam that appeared to involve Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It started small with a little pop tab collection to simply raise some money for charity and help someone — but it didn’t take long for word to get out that 10-year-old Jace Weber from Mildmay, Ont. was quickly building up a large supply of aluminum pop tabs.
There’s a group of people in Saskatoon that proudly call themselves dumpster divers, and they’re turning the city’s trash into treasure.
Ontario is facing a larger than anticipated deficit but the Doug Ford government still plans to balance its books before the next provincial election.