A Project for Tracking the Trash Flow in Georgian Bay

Tracking Trash Trips

See live map here

What can we do to protect Georgian Bay from pollution?

With our multi-year Trash Tracking Project, we will find out how and where trash is dispersed into our waters, giving us the data we need divert it.

If you would like to know more, work together, or donate to this project, please email our project manager.

Pollutants That Enter Georgian Bay Daily

Trash

Ten million tons of garbage and pollution enter our Great Lakes every year from various sources including storm sewers, blown trash, and the act of littering.

Sewage

Raw sewage overflows (RSO) release millions upon millions of raw or partially treated sewage during storm events that spill directly into Georgian Bay and Great Lakes water because of old infrastructure in many coastal municipalities which are still using combined drains.

Toxins

Regardless of the entry source of pollution into our water, toxic elements can contaminate and potentially destroy water quality for both humans and animals alike.

It is critical to answer these questions in order to help inform policies: policies aimed at upstream solutions and/or locations for technologies that can trap and/or remove waste before it has a chance to harm the water quality of GBay or flow out of our Bay and into Lakes Huron/Michigan and further downstream, potentially contaminating water and polluting wetlands as it moves.

How it Works

We will use GPS-tracked bottles deployed from pre-determined locations in order to track the route that waste and pollution may take. The GPS bottles will ping their locations every hour for a week or two. Once the bottles are retrieved, they will be deployed and tracked again.

During the off-season, the data will be analyzed considering currents, wind velocity, and the routes outlined as models of trash trips. Once the trash trip models are created, we will have an interactive map on our website, so that interested parties can see the route of the trash trips that the majority of waste is travelling from when starting at certain locations.

And as always, we will continue our shoreline cleanups, and deep-dive waste characterizations to learn more about the pollution in our water.

Thank you to

RBC Foundation for their generous support as our sponsor for this project.