Scientists track plastic waste in pristine Canada marine park

PETITSAGUENAY, CANADA - Old tires, discarded cups, and cigarette butts litter the magnificent Saguenay Fjord, a marine protect­ed area in eastern Canada that attracts belugas and other whales seeking respite. Cliffs sculpted by glaciers flank the fjord that connects to the Saint Lawrence River, far from any major city. The marine sanctuary was granted protected status 26 years ago.

“It’s one thing to legislate to make it a protected area, but then how do we maintain it?” said Canadian biologist Anne-Marie Asselin be­fore diving in search of trash. With her team from the Blue Organization, she navigates the brackish waters of the fjord to document pollution in the area. The objective is twofold: to identify the most common waste to target the plastics that should be banned from sale, and to predict the banks most at risk of being polluted, based in particular on currents, to better target cleaning campaigns.



- WORRYING TREND - By paddle board, on foot or freediving, Asselin and her crew collect all kinds of waste in the bay of the village of Petit-Saguenay. Under a blazing hot sun, the group’s Laurence Martel sorted the waste by more than 100 criteria, including by brand, to even­tually seek to hold producers responsible for their products’ entire lifecycle. “The most popular find is the cigarette butt, it is omnipresent,” Martel said.

She noted that a single cigarette butt can contam­inate up to 500 liters of water due to the thousands of chemical compounds it contains. In five years, the team’s research has revealed a worrying trend: the concentration of plastic waste is increasing sig­nificantly closer to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Atlantic, “suggesting a shift in waste from ur­ban areas towards downstream parts of the river.” “Very often, the smallest plastics are the ones that pollute the most,” Martel said.

- ECOSYSTEM HEALTH - Waste becomes microplastics as it disintegrates. Most often invisible to the naked eye, these particles are made of polymers and other toxic compounds that vary from five millimeters to one thousandth of a millimeter. They are found throughout the food chain of marine life, particu­larly invertebrates.

The Blue Organization fishes and analyzes these “sentinel species” -- consid­ered gauges of the health of their environment -- during each cleanup operation. “If your mus­sels and your invertebrates are starting to suffer, that could be an indicator that the health of the ecosystem is also declining,” said Miguel Felis­mino, of McGill University in Montreal. Seated on a catamaran, Felismino measured, photographed and arranged the mussel specimens, which he will also analyze in a laboratory to study the ef­fects of microplastics.

Using a homemade pump and a few pipes placed at the front of the boat, he also collected surface water and sediment from the seabed for his research..