Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Now, there's renewed hope from an unlikely source: Corner Brook Pulp and Paper, the mill that has occupied a swath of the the city's waterfront for almost a century. The mill has its own wastewater plant that processes its own effluent, and approached the city last year with an idea to examine expanding that to include municipal sewage. "We thought it was something that would make sense to look at," said Darren Pelley, the vice president and general manager of Corner Brook Pulp and Paper.
Two years ago, researchers collected microplastics from pristine surface waters at three nearshore locations in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, finding tiny and unrecognizable fragments, threads and fibres in every trawl. Chemical analysis has now identified the synthetic polymers that made up those miniscule pieces of plastic and confirmed what was expected: the microplastics were shed from easily recognized sources. "Fishing gear, fishing rope, fragments of nets and particles that would come from that kind of activity, that is a big source of microplastics," said Ariel Smith, the coastal and marine team lead for Coastal Action, the environmental group that is leading a three-year Atlantic Canadian microplastics research project.
