Nicole Hancock
Indigenous community hosts full moon ceremony ...

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.

Indigenous community hosts full moon ceremony to heal Chedoke Creek

seabins

WasteSharks are lurking in Toronto's harbour — and cleaning up trash

WasteSharks are lurking in Toronto's harbour — and cleaning up trash

Two new sharks are popping up in Toronto's harbour — but it's garbage, not people, who should be afraid of heading into the water. PortsToronto has brought in two WasteShark aquadrones to add to its larger trash trapping program. "It's essentially a Roomba that operates on the surface of the water," said Jessica Pellerin, manager of media relations and public affairs for PortsToronto. "[It] cleans up microplastics, debris… things that we don't want on the surface of the water and then we're able to dispose of it properly afterward."

Floating garbage bins help collect trash from Vancouver's waterways

Floating garbage bins help collect trash from Vancouver's waterways

Stationary cleaning machines called seabins are helping clear Vancouver's False Creek of garbage, one scoop of debris at a time. Sadie Caron of Fraser Riverkeeper, the charity behind the project, says the bins are attached to various spots around Granville Island. They skim the surface of the water 24 hours a day with the help of an electric pump to capture any sort of floating debris.

Industrial plastic is spilling into Great Lakes, and no one's regulating it, experts warn

Industrial plastic is spilling into Great Lakes, and no one's regulating it, experts warn

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.

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