Environmental Defence Canada wants the province to introduce a deposit return program for single-use plastic water bottles, as the Great Lakes are being affected by microplastics.
International Joint Commission Commissioner Dereth Glance says researchers are finding more than 6-million bits of plastic per square kilometre in the lakes, and those numbers are growing.
"Anything that lands on the ground, whether it be in a parking lot or your driveway, or litter anywhere, it's going to end up in the waterway after rain events," she explains.
The commissioner says things like plastic bottles and bags do break down, but end up big enough that fish confuse them with food, and the plastic is hurting local ecosystems.
According to Environmental Defence Canada, more than a billion plastic bottles are not recycled in Ontario each year, and it's just one of two provinces yet to install a deposit program. It adds that in jurisdictions with bottle return programs, between 72% and 95% of the plastic bottles are recovered for recycling.
