The Great Lakes have a plastic pollution problem — could robots help clean them up?

In the murky waters of Lake Ontario, just off the Port of Toronto, a stream of trash advances inches toward a round tubular device that floats on the water. A piece of white Styrofoam hits the edge of the device. Then, in one smooth motion, roll off the edge. With tendrils of marine plants surrounding the waste, it looks like Styrofoam has entered a portal to the undersea world. Instead, the device is the gateway to a less mysterious but important destination: the garbage he dump.

“It’s basically like a floating trash can,” says Chelsea Rochman, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto. Since his 2019, he’s been working with a team at the university to capture Lake Ontario trash in bins like this one. Called the Seabin, the device uses a motor to create a vortex that gently draws floating debris from a 160-foot radius and stores the debris in an attached basket.

In the Great Lakes, which stretch from Duluth, Minnesota to the U.S.-Canada border in upstate New York, dozens of seabins are currently working with stormwater filters in a cross-border project called the Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup. In mid-September, drones for collecting aquatic waste and roving robots for cleaning beaches also participated. All of this removes some of his 22 million pounds of plastic that enter the lake each year and helps researchers like Rockman understand the Great Lakes waste problem. .

“We know that the amount of trash we have requires more power than the people we have,” explains Rochman. Local groups have been organizing beach cleanups for decades, but people, like devices, can either remove trash 24 hours a day, or pick up tiny debris that machines can catch. you can’t.

Standing on the shores of Lake Ontario, a Toronto streetcar rattling around, Rotchman pointed out the overflowing municipal trash cans along the sidewalk. Municipal sewage systems, industrial wastewater, storm runoff, recreational boating and beach waste, and agricultural waste all end up in the lake. One bin contains a toothbrush, tampon applicator, dental floss, shoelaces, glasses, food scraps, and a syringe entwined in sea plant tendrils. Small specks of plastic stick out between the leaves.

In the lake, which 40 million people depend on as their primary source of drinking water, this waste decomposes and turns into microscopic pieces of plastic and debris that are eaten by fish, sucked into surrounding water treatment plants, and washed onto shores and water. They are drawn to rivers. go out to sea When fish consume plastic, it releases chemicals such as dyes and flame retardants that can irritate and damage the fish’s digestive system. Rockman expects to find hundreds of pieces of plastic in large sport fish like lake trout and salmon. Microplastics have also been found in the region’s drinking water, and many water treatment plants are not equipped to filter out small debris. (Researchers continue to investigate potential problems, but the risks of human consumption of microplastics remain unknown.)

Each piece of garbage becomes a separate data point when captured by a researcher like Rochman. During the summer, students take out the jars each day to count, sort, and dispose of the contents. “They know how many cigarette butts we collect, how many straws we collect, how many foam containers we collect,” says Rochman. One day the catch became even more amazing. Students counted deli meat slices, old shoes, and once a coconut at Seabins this summer.

Seabins collect an average of 28 grams of waste each day. “Plastic is light, so it sounds like a small number,” says Rochman. Its weight ranges from a few hundred to he 2,000 microplastics and several larger waste products. Rochman expects her team to remove as much plastic as her 7,000 plastic bottles this summer. That’s only 12 of her university-supervised dumpsters, and just a fraction of the devices deployed at her 45 marinas in the Great Lakes region.

From the north shore of Lake Superior in Thunder Bay, Ontario, to the port of Buffalo, New York, just a short drive from Niagara Falls, there are 44 sea bins like those on Toronto’s Harbourfront, typically starting in May. It’s working. Until November. These bins are monitored by marina owners or local organizations, not by researchers. The participating site partner weighs and disposes of the contents when the bins are full, and five to ten times a year he conducts audits that characterize the complete waste. Many marinas also have catch basins called LittaTraps. It is installed inside storm drains and traps waste before it enters the lake system. Between 2020 and 2021, the project’s tech has collected over 74,000 pieces of trash. The team expects this number to increase as it continues to reach out to marinas and local governments in the area.

In September, a waste-collection drone and a beach-cleaning robot also joined the project’s garbage-collection technology. Built by The Seaial Cleaners, a French waste recovery technology company, the device collects waste from lakes and beaches and operates both remotely and autonomously. The company’s CEO, Claire Touvier, said the roving robot is also a major public engagement tool. “That’s why this robot had to be sexy, cool and fun, and it had to have a cool name. These are very efficient tools in terms of raising awareness,” she says.

Yet this technology is still a reactive approach. Robots can help clean up the lakes, but at the heart of the Great Lakes litter problem are human choices regarding how much plastic to produce, consume and dispose of. Melissa DeYoung, her director of policies and programs for the Canadian nonprofit Contamination Probes, one of her main funders of the project, says the key to long-term solutions is changing them. I say that. “We are doing what we can to remove plastic from the water, but we know that technology alone will not solve the problem,” she explains. “The data we are collecting is very important because it helps us understand the extent of the problem in the first place.”

For example, if large macroplastics are wound up in a particular local trapping device, nearby communities may not have easy access to disposal facilities or may not be informed as to why proper waste disposal is important. Or, if pre-manufactured pellets or small pieces of plastic used in the manufacture of other products, called pre-manufactured nuddles, are more common, somewhere upstream the manufacturer is improperly disposing of that waste. It may indicate that there is a possibility.

The waste collected informs the group’s approach to local solutions, whether it means launching new educational campaigns, meeting with policymakers, or advocating for new industry mandates. The team discussed Ontario’s new legislation. The law requires that the foam used to construct cottages and marina floating docks be completely sealed and therefore not soluble in water. The group also introduced legislation in Ontario that would require washing machine filters to keep microfibers from entering the sewer system, and in Illinois, including stronger laws on pre-manufacturing plastic disposal.

“When we go to government policy makers, when we go to local industry, we say to others, ‘Listen, we have a problem here and we need to fix it.’ When we say, we have localized data, regional data really helps us in these conversations in terms of getting people’s attention and motivating them to do something,” he said to the project. says Mark Fisher, director of the Great Lakes Council, the bilateral organization that provides funding.

Other researchers in the region are also optimistic about the new technology on the lake. No initiative can recover 22 million pounds of plastic from the Great Lakes each year, but projects that can drive public and political action can make a big difference, says a biology professor at Loyola University Chicago. explains Timothy Hollein. Another lake cleanup She has worked on a project but is not involved in this one. As for Seabins, “individual footprints are pretty small,” Hoellein says. “But overall, it can really make a difference.”

As this strategy proves successful in the region, its lessons are beginning to spread far beyond the shores of the Great Lakes. Rochman and his team at the University of Toronto partnered with the nonprofit environmental organization Ocean Conservancy to create the International Trash Trap Network. Data collection continues wherever the trash trap captures waste.

This is all part of the goal of achieving a future where freshwater sources like the Great Lakes are no longer waste dumping zones. I will add.

But for now, and for the foreseeable future, the waste problem continues, so floating trash cans keep spinning waste-trapping vortices. or a piece of food wrapper) pokes its edge into the sea bin and falls.