The Lake Huron Centre for Coastal Conservation is attempting to raise awareness of micro-plastics found in Lake Huron.
Coastal Stewardship Technician, Alyssa Bourassa, describes a micro-plastic as any piece of plastic less than 5 millimetres in size and because of its microscopic size, micro-plastics are often not captured in current wastewater management systems therefore they are released into the water. Bourassa says there are five different types of micro-plastics and most of them are very difficult to see.
She said, “If you find fragments, it's possible to see them with the naked eye, foam you can, nurdles you can, micro-beads, you can almost feel them, but if you look really closely you can, but fibres are actually the biggest problem and you can't see them.”
Bourassa says most fibres come from your clothes when they're being washed.
“When you wash your clothes, it comes out in the wash. There's nothing to trap them right now, to trap them right at the source, in your washing machine, but once it gets into the waste water and goes into the treatment plant, they're so small that they just end up right back in our water way,” she explained
Bourassa says the fibres are so small that we don't know when we're ingesting them or when an animal is ingesting them.
She continued, “and when that happens, basically, the toxins in these little pieces of plastic get into the bodies of animals and ourselves and they leach the toxins that are in them, so that ends up in our tissues and in animal's tissues.”
She says as larger animals eat them, the toxins bio-stimulate and get more toxic as they move up through the food chain.
Bourassa says fibres are the most common micro-plastic and also the most difficult to detect. More information about micro-plastics can be found on the Lake Huron Centre web site.
