Tiny plastics 'like rice on your kitchen floor' pose hidden pollution risk on Toronto's waterfront

Often colourless and no larger than a grain of rice, plastic pellets are an easy-to-miss source of pollution on the city's shorelines, but a group of University of Toronto students and researchers wants the public to start paying attention.

Calling itself the U of T Trash Team, the group is hosting a community cleanup on Saturday morning to spread awareness about pre-production plastic pollution on the waterfront. 

Compared to single-use plastics, the pellets' small size makes them hard to spot and difficult to pick up when they're spilled at factories or in the transportation process, according to Eden Hataley, a member of the Trash Team and a graduate student in physical and environmental sciences. 

"They're so small, they're so lightweight, that the best practice is to sweep anything you lose up immediately. But I mean, think about dropping rice on your kitchen floor, it's just difficult, right?" she told CBC Toronto. "So inevitably, some pellets get left behind." 

"The volume[s] of pellets that these companies are moving are so massive, that it's not like one or two, it's hundreds, thousands, millions over the course of the year."

Prevention tools exist, but not in wide use

The pellets – which end up on shorelines through direct spills or by getting pulled into the stormwater system – are the raw material used to make plastic products. 

Mesh storm water drains can pick up pellets before they end up in the environment, while seabins – which are trash traps for the water – and colanders can be used to clean them up, according to Hataley.  

But the traps aren't widely used in part because of a lack of public awareness about plastic pellets. That makes it difficult to demand policy changes, says Hataley.

"I think [that by] bringing awareness to this [issue] through the community, we can drive momentum to get positive change to occur," Hataley said.

The clean-up event, which takes place at Sir Casimir Gzowski Park Beach in the city's west end, is meant to show the public how pellets are collected and disposed of.

The team will supply attendees with clean-up tools like colanders, so that they can play an active role in the process, the group says.

Jessica Pellerin is senior manager of communications for Ports Toronto, an organization that has been collaborating with the U of T Trash Team on a trash trapping operation in the city's harbour since 2019. 

Ports Toronto and the Trash Team recently placed seabins along the city waterfront, Pellerin told CBC Toronto, and monitored how much trash they picked up. 

The bins collected nearly 175,000 small pieces of plastic from the city harbour between May and October 2024. Of that amount, 5.7 per cent was pre-production plastic pellets, she said.  

Province takes plastic pollution 'very seriously'

Gary Wheeler, spokesperson of the Ontario Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks, says pellets make up more than 25 per cent of the plastic items found on beaches in the Great Lakes, outnumbering all other plastic debris items collected.

The ministry takes plastic pollution "very seriously," says Wheeler, and has invested over $2.7 million into more than a dozen projects that reduce plastic pollution in the Great Lakes since 2018. 

Additionally, when pellet spills into the environment are reported through the ministry's Spills Action Centre, environmental officers ensure companies address the problem and clean up the spills, according to Wheeler. 

Still, participatory initiatives such as Saturday's event are vital, Pellerin says, in keeping the issue top of mind for policy makers.  

"Informing the community, inviting them to participate is a very powerful way of getting people involved and getting them to care about the issue, so that, hopefully, personal behaviours can change, but also it becomes a bit broader and policy will change, as well," she said.