How much plastic is in Ontario rivers, and where is it going? Ask this high school student

Ritvik Manicka hasn't finished high school yet, but he may have figured out how to mitigate plastic pollution in some of our rivers. 

The Grade 11 Bishop Reding Secondary School student in Milton has always had an interest in how computer modelling can be applied in the real world. More specifically, he says he hoped to use it in an environmental application. 

"For me… protecting our waterways is something of great importance and that I hold near and dear," he said. 

When he stumbled upon a University of Toronto website examining high traces of microplastics in Lake Ontario it got his mind thinking. 

"What I wanted to understand is how do these plastics firstly get into Lake Ontario?" he said. "Surely there are the more obvious ways — one is that these plastics could be discarded into the lake either on purpose or by accident." 

But he needed some help to figure out the less obvious ways in which plastics dominate Ontario rivers. That's when he and fellow student Suraj Subrahmanyan contacted the University of Toronto Trash Team.

They figured out how to deploy satellite-based water bottles into the Grand River, Credit River and Bronte Creek to see how it moves across the river system. 

"We could potentially kind of predict how plastic that was disposed of in Kitchener would ultimately end up in Lake Ontario," said Manicka. 

From there, the student-led project got funding from non-profit OceanWise, and through the team they could connect with professors from the University of Chicago, University of Chicago Loyola and University of New Hampshire. 

"Together, they helped us essentially analyze the data and what the bigger implications are." 

According to Karen Wirsig, senior program manager for plastics at Environmental Defence Canada, seeing young people interested in mitigating plastic pollution is "really encouraging." 

"Plastic is such a ubiquitous pollutant," she said. "But it's also something that's an intimate pollutant because we all come into so much contact with it everyday." 

"So seeing students taking an interest in what happens to it in the environment is really important."

The bottles that Manicka and his team placed into the rivers were satellite-based blender bottles, with a little bit of clay to add some weight.