WC137 JulyAug 2024 - Magazine - Page 32
RESEARCH
“There is no other place in the world like the IISD-ELA where
researchers can design and conduct science to answer so many of
these complex and solutions-informing research questions.”
Solving the Plastic Pollution Problem
Three universities set out to find how and why microplastics end up in
remote lakes in an effort to reform policies on microplastic pollution.
BY SUMEEP BATH
T’S NO SECRET that microplastic pollution
is ubiquitous across the globe, even in remote
locations.
But if ever we needed evidence that plastics are
truly everywhere, a study conducted at Canada’s
IISD Experimental Lakes Area has found plastics
in each of the nine remote lakes tested, right in the
middle of the boreal forest.
The paper, recently published in the Society of
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry journal, is
part of a broader suite of studies collectively known
as the pELAstic project, a collaborative project led by
researchers from the University of Toronto, Queen’s
University, and Lakehead University.
By working at IISD-ELA, it aims to determine
how and why plastics end up in our freshwater systems, what impact they ultimately have on all aspects
of a freshwater system (say, a lake), and then which
changes to policies would be most effective to protect
those ecosystems.
The pELAstic project is a decade-long study using
a whole ecosystem to answer difficult questions.
When plastic enters a lake or ocean, where does it
go and how? How do animals and plants interact
with microplastics, and how does it move through
complex food webs? How do microplastics affect the
health of plants and animals, including at all levels of
I
Sumeep Bath
is the editorial and
communications manager for the
IISD Experimental Lakes Area
32
WATER C AN ADA • JULY/AUGUS T 2024
the food web—from plankton to fish? And finally, what
does mitigation look like? How does a lake recover and
how long does it take?
There is no other place in the world like the IISDELA where researchers can design and conduct science
to answer so many of these complex and solutions-informing research questions. Being in a remote location
in Canada, you might ask how this relates to other parts
of the world.
The research may be conducted—and the results may
be extracted—from a remote location in Canada, but
the whole project aims to improve policy decisions on
plastic pollution to protect the freshwater systems on
which we all depend, across the globe.
Nine lakes in the middle of nowhere
The pELAstic project began with a local survey to understand the background contamination of microplastics before the experimental work began. This local
survey study, in particular, set about to find out whether
plastics would be detected in a place that sees minimal
human activity.
The spot in question was IISD Experimental Lakes
Area—the site of the pELAstics project.
Otherwise known as the world’s freshwater laboratory,
IISD-ELA is a series of 58 lakes and their watersheds in
northwestern Ontario, and the only place in the world
where scientists can research and manipulate real lakes
to build a more accurate and complete picture of what
human activity is doing to freshwater lakes. The findings
from more than 50 years of ground-breaking research
have rewritten environmental policy around the world—
from mitigating algal blooms to reducing how much
mercury gets into our waterways—and aim to keep freshwater clean around the world for generations to come.
WAT E R C A N A D A . N E T
