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.
Taylor Kormann didn't know what to expect when she signed up to collect the goopy leftovers of her laundry cycles for a year as a part of a citizen science project for the Atlantic Coastal Action Program. "It was almost shocking to see what's coming out of the laundry," Kormann said. Kormann and 22 other Saint John residents spent 2022 collecting the wet lint from their washing machines to measure the microplastics their wash cycles were contributing to the city's water system.
Microplastics were found in 83.3 percent of Lake Huron water samples collected by Coast Watchers in 2021. Coast Watchers is a program of the Lake Huron Coastal Centre (LHCC) and has been in operation since 2005, analzying water samples for microplastics since 2018. That first year they found microplastics in 95.7 percent of the samples collected. The trend is not generally going down, said Alyssa Bourassa, coastal stewardship technician at the Centre.
A new study is taking the fight against microfibres in the Great Lakes back to the source: washing machines. The tiny particles of plastic are shed by synthetic fabrics like nylon and fleece when they're washed, slipping through water treatment plants and into the lakes. To stem the flow, researchers will install about 100 special filters on washing machines in Parry Sound, Ont. to see if they reduce the amount of plastic particles that show up at the town's water treatment plant.
