Nick Foxcroft removes one of two Seabins from Bronte Outer Harbour Marina November 16.

Lynn Lau

Anglers tackle plastics pollution problem in Bronte

This year, two garbage sifting devices installed at Bronte Outer Harbour Marina trapped food packaging, bottle caps, straws, and other floating debris -- symptoms of society's dependence on single-use plastic.

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Charter boat operator Nick Foxcroft would probably rather be catching fish on this freezing afternoon in late November, but instead, he's fishing plastic bits out of Bronte Harbour.

The plastic bits have been captured by one of two Seabins he installed in the spring in partnership with the Town of Oakville and the non-profit anglers group he founded in 2020 to run the Silver Salmon Challenge, a Lake Ontario fishing tournament.

A Seabin is a sieve for floating litter, and it resembles a 100-lb salad spinner. Two of them have been attached to piers at Bronte Outer Harbour Marina since May. The inside of the Seabin is a mesh basket, and the outside contains an electric pump that keeps water moving through the mesh day and night. 

"Fish is our concern," says the lifelong angler, "but the fish are actually consuming all these microplastics, and then we're eating the fish, so we're all getting plastic. It's everywhere."

This is his last Seabin haul for the season, and as usual, it is full of vegetation entangled with garbage, some of which is so small, it's hard to identify if you don't know what you're looking for. Foxcroft singles out a grey plastic bead the size of the eraser tip of a pencil. "These are pellets straight from a factory," he explains.

"If you have a company and you're making plastics, they send you these pellets to melt down. These haven't even been turned into anything yet.

"We actually find a concerning amount of these. It is disappointing to know that before it's even used, it's in the waterways."

By hosting the Seabins, Bronte Outer Harbour Marina is participating in the Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup, a network of Great Lakes marinas attempting to tackle the plastic waste problem.

Foxcroft's organization purchased and installed the units, which cost about $15,000 to $18,000 to purchase, install and run for the year.

The Town of Oakville contributed the secure space, electricity and staff to empty the bins every day or two during the season. Staff weighed the contents of the bins and submitted data to an app created by the University of Toronto Trash Team. This group is crunching data from similar installations around the Great Lakes.

According to principal researcher Chelsea M. Rochman at the U of T, the two Seabins at Bronte Outer Harbour picked up more than 13,000 bits of small plastic debris or about 1.4 kg from May to October. "It might not sound that significant," Rochman says, "until you consider how lightweight plastic is." If a disposable water bottle weighs about 9 grams, 1.4 kg would be equivalent to more than 150 bottles.

When Rochman's team audited the contents of a similar installation at Toronto Harbour in 2020, they found pre-production plastic pellets formed a significant proportion of the litter trapped. 

As part of her work, Rochman started an International Trash Trap Network with the Ocean Conservancy, and she says the current task is to work with governments on regulations for plastic pellet loss.

Although the trash collected by the Seabins represents a literal drop in the ocean -- it's estimated 10,000 tonnes of plastic waste enters the Great Lakes annually -- for Foxcroft, the Seabin project is primarily about public awareness. He wants more people to understand and respect the Great Lakes. "Most people don't understand the waterways," he says.

In Spring 2022, Foxcroft expects his group will have seven of their eight Seabins back in operation along the north shore of Lake Ontario, with a total of 15 operational by the end of the summer.