It's a great question.
Today, through the Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup, which we run with Pollution Probe—one of Canada's oldest environmental charities—we have a series of innovative capture and cleanup technologies that we operate in Ontario and across a number of states. Working with local partners, we are collecting debris on beaches and in our waterways, particularly our marinas, in order to characterize what we're finding. It's plastic, and typically smaller plastic—cigarette butts, predominantly, and broken-down food and beverage materials that have been in the environment for a long time. By collecting that and understanding the types and sizes, we can work to understand the different sources and pathways. How did it end up there? It is predominantly public litter. I will say that.
That data is extremely helpful in having conversations with decision-makers like you about how to stop this from a policy standpoint, and how to engage with coastal communities in order to let them know the impact that this type of behaviour and those activities are having on our environment and the Great Lakes.
There is certainly a lot more research happening today, through our higher education institutions, about the scale and scope of microplastics and microfibres in the Great Lakes. As said in a previous testimony, we're trying to understand the environmental and human health impacts of that material when it finds its way into, let's say, drinking water or wildlife.