“It’s basically like a floating trash can.”
Once captured by researchers like Rochman, each piece of trash becomes another data point. Each day during the summer, students haul out the bins to count, classify, and dispose of their contents. “They know how many cigarette butts we collect, how many straws we collect, how many foam containers we collect,” Rochman says. Some days, the catch is more surprising — students have counted slices of deli meat, old shoes, and, once, a coconut in Seabins this summer.
From the northern shores of Lake Superior in Thunder Bay, Ontario, to the harbor of Buffalo, New York, just a short drive from Niagara Falls, Seabins like the ones in the Toronto harborfront are deployed at 44 other locations, typically in operation from May to November. These bins are monitored not by researchers but by marina owners or local organizations.
If large macroplastics wind up in capture devices in a certain area, for example, that can indicate communities nearby may lack easy access to disposal facilities or may be uninformed on why proper waste disposal is important. Alternatively, if small plastic pieces used to build other products, called preproduction pellets, or nurdles, are more common, that can indicate that somewhere upstream, a manufacturer may be improperly disposing of its trash.
As the strategy garners success in the region, its lessons have begun to reach far beyond the Great Lakes’ shores. Rochman and the team at the University of Toronto have partnered with the nonprofit environmental group Ocean Conservancy to found the International Trash Trap Network, which works with groups from Fiji to Florida to help create more trash trapping strategies. Wherever trash traps capture waste, data collection follows.
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