Nearly 175K pieces of small plastic collected from Toronto Harbour in 6 months last year

PortsToronto staff empty a WasteShark aquadrone of floating debris captured during a Trash Trapping Program mission in the Peter Street Basin on the Toronto waterfront. The materials collected by trash traps are counter and characterized by U of T Trash Team researchers. (CNW Group/PortsToronto)

About 175,000 pieces of small pieces of plastic were collected from the Toronto Harbour over a period of six months last year.

From May to October 2024, the Trash Trapping Program, helmed by PortsToronto and the University of Toronto Trash Team, said their litter-collecting network diverted 642 kilograms of man-made waste.

In total, about 174,251 small plastics and 53,886 large plastics—totalling 228,137 pieces—were pulled from Lake Ontario near the Toronto Harbour.

“Due to an increased capacity through more traps and more human power, we remove more and more plastic pollution from our waterfront ever year,” Dr. Chelsea Rochman, head of operations at the U of T Trash Team, said in Monday’s release.

Among large debris, the trash team says the most common items were foam, cigarette butts, plastic bottle caps and large plastic fragments. They add that foam also accounted for nearly half (49.5 per cent) of all small plastics found in the water.

“Moreover, the data we collect is used to inform the preventative solutions we work on together—such as reducing litter from cigarette butts, rethinking garbage bins to reduce overflow, and reducing single-use food-ware and produce bags in local businesses. Holistically, the work we do trapping trash and preventing plastic pollution reduces the plastic pollution in Toronto’s water—protecting wildlife and humans,” Rochman said.

Microplastics and other tiny debris smaller than five millimetres remain the most commonly collected waste, according to the program, noting plastic breaks down into this size after spending some time in the water, making it hard to trace its origins.

“Scientists predict that 10,000 metric tons of plastic waste enter the Great Lakes every year,” the organization said in a brief published on Monday. “Plastic pollution can have numerous adverse effects on organisms through entanglement and ingestion.”

The team has been collecting trash in Lake Ontario since 2019, using technology like LittaTraps, Seabins and WasteSharks. They also use a method called “skimming,” where they manually scoop floatable litter from the lake’s surface.

The trash trapping program runs between May and October annually, with PortsToronto in the process of procuring three new fixed devices to be installed this coming spring.

In 2023, the program collected a total of 66,906 small plastic pieces, weighing just more than 235 kilograms.