What are those orange bottles?

May 13, 2021

If boaters in Ontarians ever get to launch, they may run across some special orange bottles floating in the Toronto area.

The bottles are part of the Tagging Trash Project a solutions-based research project as part of their Fighting Floatables in the Toronto Harbour initiative. They have released GPS-tracked plastic bottles into the Toronto Harbour to measure how plastic litter travels and accumulates. On Monday April 26 the team deployed bottles into the lake from different locations along the waterfront (between the Humber River and Outer Harbour Marina).

The project aims to reveal pathways of litter in the Toronto Harbour to better understand local sources of litter and help inform how to tackle our plastic pollution issue. By releasing GPS-tracked bottles into the Toronto Harbour, the team can better understand how litter travels in and around the harbour. This will help inform future placement of trash capture devices (like Seabins) to divert litter from Lake Ontario. To prevent creating more litter, each bottle has its very own GPS tracker so the team can retrieve all bottles once they’ve finished charting their journey across the harbour.

To learn more about the project and follow the travels of the orange bottles visit https://uofttrashteam.ca/taggingtrash/