Tiny plastics 'like rice on your kitchen floor' pose hidden pollution risk on Toronto's waterfront

Janna Abbas · CBC News

· Posted: May 10, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 32 minutes ago

Often colourless and nary larger than a atom of rice, integrative pellets are an easy-to-miss root of contamination connected the city's shorelines, but a radical of University of Toronto students and researchers wants the nationalist to commencement paying attention.

Calling itself the U of T Trash Team, the group is hosting a assemblage cleanup connected Sunday greeting to dispersed consciousness astir pre-production integrative contamination connected the waterfront. 

Compared to single-use plastics, the pellets' tiny size makes them hard to spot and hard to prime up erstwhile they're spilled astatine factories oregon successful the proscription process, according to Eden Hataley, a subordinate of the Trash Team and a postgraduate pupil in physical and biology sciences. 

"They're truthful small, they're truthful lightweight, that the champion signifier is to expanse thing you suffer up immediately. But I mean, deliberation astir dropping atom connected your room floor, it's conscionable difficult, right?" she told CBC Toronto. "So inevitably, immoderate pellets get near behind." 

"The volume[s] of pellets that these companies are moving are truthful massive, that it's not similar 1 oregon two, it's hundreds, thousands, millions implicit the people of the year."

Prevention tools exist, but not in wide use

The pellets – which extremity up connected shorelines done nonstop spills oregon by getting pulled into the stormwater strategy – are the earthy worldly utilized to marque integrative products. 

Mesh tempest h2o drains tin prime up pellets earlier they extremity up successful the environment, portion seabins – which are trash traps for the h2o – and colanders tin beryllium utilized to cleanable them up, according to Hataley.  

But the traps aren't wide utilized successful portion due to the fact that of a deficiency of nationalist consciousness astir integrative pellets. That makes it hard to request argumentation changes, says Hataley.

"I deliberation [that by] bringing consciousness to this [issue] done the community, we tin thrust momentum to get affirmative alteration to occur," Hataley said.

The clean-up event, which takes spot astatine Sir Casimir Gzowski Park Beach successful the city's westbound end, is meant to amusement the nationalist however pellets are collected and disposed of.

The squad volition proviso attendees with clean-up tools similar colanders, truthful that they tin play an progressive relation successful the process, the radical says.

Jessica Pellerin is elder manager of communications for Ports Toronto, an enactment that has been collaborating with the U of T Trash Team connected a trash trapping cognition successful the city's harbour since 2019. 

Ports Toronto and the Trash Team precocious placed seabins on the metropolis waterfront, Pellerin told CBC Toronto, and monitored however overmuch trash they picked up. 

The bins collected astir 175,000 tiny pieces of integrative from the metropolis harbour betwixt May and October 2024. Of that amount, 5.7 per cent was pre-production integrative pellets, she said.  

Province takes integrative contamination 'very seriously'

Gary Wheeler, spokesperson of the Ontario Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks, says pellets marque up more than 25 per cent of the integrative items recovered connected beaches successful the Great Lakes, outnumbering all different integrative debris items collected.

The ministry takes integrative contamination "very seriously," says Wheeler, and has invested over $2.7 cardinal into much than a dozen projects that trim integrative contamination successful the Great Lakes since 2018. 

Additionally, erstwhile pellet spills into the environment are reported done the ministry's Spills Action Centre, biology officers guarantee companies code the occupation and cleanable up the spills, according to Wheeler. 

Still, participatory initiatives specified arsenic Sunday's lawsuit are vital, Pellerin says, successful keeping the contented apical of caput for argumentation makers.  

"Informing the community, inviting them to enactment is simply a precise almighty mode of getting radical progressive and getting them to attraction astir the issue, truthful that, hopefully, idiosyncratic behaviours tin change, but besides it becomes a spot broader and argumentation volition change, arsenic well," she said.