Thank you, Chair Miedema and Vice-Chairs Ross and Bonin, for the invitation. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to share my expertise.
My name is Chelsea Rochman, and I'm an associate professor at the University of Toronto. I have been researching plastic pollution for nearly 20 years. My research is widely known for increasing our understanding of the prevalence, persistence and ecological effects of plastics in the environment. I study plastic debris globally, including here in the Great Lakes as well as in the Canadian Arctic. I'm often asked to advise governments on the issue of plastics in the environment. This includes the United Nations and every level of government in both the United States and Canada. I recently co-led a working group on monitoring and risk for the International Joint Commission, a binational organization created by Canada and the U.S. to protect our resources and boundary waters, including in the Great Lakes. Today, I will focus on the evidence demonstrating that plastic pollution is ubiquitous, persistent and harmful.
Plastic pollution is increasing, and if we want to protect wildlife, we must focus on waste reduction, which is a proven solution. According to the Government of Canada, we lost 90,000 tonnes of plastics to the environment in 2019, which is equivalent to 53 million garbage bags of plastic waste, a figure predicted to increase 19% by 2040.
I can tell you a bit about what I see in Toronto. I supervise students who clean and monitor plastic floating in our harbour. They cover about a two-kilometre stretch of the waterfront. Every year, we remove hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic from the water. The most common items we see are single-use plastics, including food wrappers, straws, plastic bags, bottle caps and cigarette filters. Although we clean a lot, we don't make a dent. Cleanup will not solve this problem, and we are currently failing to keep Toronto's waters clean.
Toronto's Don River is among the most urbanized in Canada. We estimate that this river contributes roughly tens of thousands of plastic items, plus 500 billion microplastics, defined as one micron to five millimetres in size, into Lake Ontario annually. Downstream, the fish have the highest levels of microplastics reported globally. Microplastics are in every fish that we sample from Lake Ontario as part of the government's sport fish program. That's every fish.
The weight of evidence about the effects of microplastics has grown quite a bit. There is no doubt that microplastics can harm organisms. Scientists now have enough data to synthesize toxicity results into risk assessments. Most recently, within the International Joint Commission, we quantified the risk of microplastics to the Great Lakes. Based on our findings, our group of scientists and policy-makers recommended that microplastics be listed as a chemical of mutual concern under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.
Across the lakes, there is a consistent release of plastic. It is ubiquitous and persistent, and it is found at concentrations that cross risk thresholds. Related to this, plastic manufactured items fit the definition of toxic under the CEPA, which states that a substance is toxic if it enters the environment in a concentration, or under conditions, that may have a harmful effect. Plastic manufactured items break down into microplastics in the environment. Moreover, whole plastic manufactured items cause harm at amounts we see in nature. Animals eat plastic items such as bottle caps, straws and bags, and this can cause injury or death.
We recently published a quantitative risk assessment in a top scientific journal measuring how much plastic is too much for seabirds, turtles and marine mammals. Plastic ingestion has been documented in every seabird family, every marine mammal family and every sea turtle species. Based on necropsy data, our model predicts the amount of plastic that is nearly certain to kill an animal. For seabirds, plastic waste in the volume of one to two marbles will almost certainly be lethal. For turtles, the number is about one to two baseballs, and for whales, it's about one to seven basketballs. In smaller animals, death can occur from a smaller load. Just one bottle cap can kill a seabird. There is risk to wildlife from the amounts we observe in nature, thus the current state of the science supports managing plastic under the CEPA.
Since Canada started to address plastic pollution seriously, Canada has quickly risen as a global leader due to its comprehensive policies aimed at reducing plastic waste and pollution, which include the ban on a handful of single-use plastic items, microbeads and rinse-off personal care products. Since the ban on microbeads, the presence of microbeads has plummeted in Great Lakes water samples. Since the single-use plastic ban, the great Canadian shoreline cleanup reports a decline in every single one of these items.
Reducing single-use plastics that are common in the environment, are not practically reusable or recyclable and that have a substitution is a key part of the transition to a circular economy. It also protects the environment. The scientific evidence supports staying the course, continuing to be a leader and enforcing the current policies already in place.
Thank you. I'd be happy to answer questions.