Industrial plastic is spilling into Great Lakes, and no one's regulating it, experts warn
CBC
As the people of Toronto flocked to the Lake Ontario waterfront to swim, paddle and generally escape pandemic isolation, Chelsea Rochman's students at the University of Toronto were throwing plastic bottles with GPS trackers into the water.
The research team's goal is to track trash that ends up in the lake, to figure out where it accumulates in the water and where it's coming from in the first place.
Using information from the tracking bottles, they chose spots to put in Seabins — stationary cleaning machines that suck in water all day and trap any garbage and debris — at marinas along the waterfront. They are emptied daily, and the debris collected in them is examined to ferret out what kinds of trash is getting into the lake.
The waste includes well-known single-use culprits like takeout containers and clear plastic packaging, but they also include something that gets less attention: pre-production pellets, produced by the plastics industry.
"They're the tiny little pellets that are later melted down into plastic and different plastic products," Rochman said.
"So we can trace them back to industry, they have a very distinct look. And then we are now working with industry to try to make sure that they capture them at the source so they don't come down into the lake."
An estimated 10,000 tons of plastic waste are getting into the Great Lakes every year, threatening one of the largest reservoirs of freshwater on the planet that supports nearly 50 million people in Canada and the U.S. A 2021 study on seven fish species in Lake Ontario and Lake Superior found "the highest concentration of microplastics and other anthropogenic microparticles ever reported in bony fish."
A decision over how the provincial government regulates moose hunting in a First Nation's traditional territory now rests with a Manitoba judge, whose ruling will be precedent-setting, lawyers in the case say.
A teenager diagnosed with bird flu in British Columbia is the first domestically acquired human case of H5N1 avian influenza, the Public Health Agency of Canada says.
The Manitoba government made a "political compromise" in its decision to issue a reduced number of moose hunting licences to non-Indigenous hunters in northern parts of the province earlier this year, a lawyer representing a First Nation in the area has argued in court.
If it weren't for a stem cell transplant — less than half a cup of blood from a stranger's umbilical cord — four-year-old Tristan Ford would almost certainly have died as an infant, his parents say.
A Métis saddle from the early 1800s is at the centre of an exhibit that opened last month at a Swiss museum, along with contemporary beadwork created by other Red River Métis artists.
A dome-shaped device floating in Halifax's Northwest Arm could easily be confused with a buoy, but it is actually a contraption meant to turn ocean water into fresh water.
As of Tuesday, there are limits on the number of bottles of spirits a person can buy at the B.C. Liquor store in Tofino, a move that leaders of the Ahousaht First Nation were pushing for.
This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.
Mohawk code talkers and their missions were so vital during the Second World War, that some believe without them, there was no way of winning of the war.
Two feisty ferret babies in Virginia are being hailed as a symbol of hope for the future of their species.
On day one of Donald Trump's presidency, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he'll be advising Trump to take fluoride out of public water. The former independent presidential hopeful — and prominent proponent of debunked public health claims — has been told he'll be put in charge of health initiatives in the new Trump administration. He's described fluoride as "industrial waste."