AuDN4T

I took a stroll along the lake today along Sunnyside Beach.

Saw low water levels (visible on the west side of the beach by the Humber River bridge)…. with a lot of sand elevated. In that sand, you see a lot of garbage. Lighters, nitrile gloves, pot gummy bags, meat packaging, bottles, bottle caps, random plastic. It’s super sad to see. You also see a lot of construction waste (concrete chunks, bricks, pottery) thrown out here. Is it acceptable for construction companies can just dump garbage in our waterways. I understand we have allowed for lake filling and there are regulations to ensure that the water is not further degraded with these products. Why do we still see this in our waterfront? You go to Tommy Thompson Park and you see rebar and brick in weird structures… in some situations that rebar can impale someone walking by.

Yes – it may be fun and apocalyptic in creating art with construction waste; however, it does impact the waterways. There are other more safer ways to lake fill. Would it not be more feasible to do this?

The waste isn’t even on the shores, you find nitrile gloves at the bottom of the water bed.

Even then if we pick up this garbage – where will it go? Another landfill that will impact another town’s waterway? I remember the Alliston Aquifer being at risk of contaminated with a garbage dumpsite (that had a liner expiration of 35 years). Why is this the route we want to go with? There is the option for incineration – trying to avoid further impacting the air quality – capturing gasses.

Why can’t we reduce how much single use plastic is used? It’s in everything despite legislation banning it. We’ve banned plastic bags and straws, replacing them with multi-use bags and paper straws but we still have single use plastics. It’s in our food – meat packaging, cereal liners, instant noodle cups, coffee cup liners, water bottles, salad kit packages, packaging of products. How much of that plastic is recyclable? Much of it is not… including black plastic. Let’s not forget about the other health effects associated with paper straws due to PFAS (forever chemicals) that have an impact on immune systems, cholesterol, increase risk of cancer, etc. The difficult thing here is that this isn’t just a Canada specific change that needs to be implemented – we’d need countries around the world to make these changes due to globalization and products being sold from all over the world.

Why can’t we look at the use of biodegradable packaging? Perhaps it might need to have waste management organizations to adapt to the changes of biodegradable packaging. However, if we’re truly moving towards making this world more sustainable and eco-friendly, why are we not progressing into this? Should we be creating standards of what needs to be implemented?

Walking around Jasper National Park and seeing a golf course with numerous golf balls in the lake. Not that I’m constantly pessimistic but I questioned – why? Golf balls degrade plastic into that waterway. Years later I saw golf balls by a Lake Ontario shoreline and made me wonder how many people shoot golf balls into the lake? It’s such a harmful thing to do to this water that literally gives us life every day. We just treat it like nothing – we have so much of it, why should we care? Other parts of this continent have droughts and beg for the water. But here we treat it like it’s nothing. Throw trash in it, flush medications down the toilet.

How do we get action on this?