Microplastics: Pollutants in a Small Package

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On August 1, Jeremy Frech was about to embark on a kayaking outing with his family at Pancake Bay Provincial Park, on the Canadian shore north of Sault Ste. Marie, when the waves began to build. While the paddlers waited out the rough seas, Jeremy’s mother recalled a curious incident. The day before, she met a young boy on the beach who had collected a handful of white pellets, not sure what they were.

Intrigued, Jeremy poked through piles of debris, the usual driftwood and detritus that wash ashore, and there they were – dozens of pea-sized plastic beads.

“We found them all over,” says Jeremy. “I thought maybe it was an isolated thing, from a diaper or something.”

He found more plastic beads the next day, 80 kilometres (50 miles) north, while fishing at the mouth of the Sand River. His mom later called to report still more of the beads, this time to the south in Goulais Bay.

“That’s when I knew something was going on,” he says.

Turns out, they were not new. An unknown quantity of the plastic beads found their way into Lake Superior more than seven years ago when a train derailed between Nipigon and Rossport, reports the Ontario Ministry of Environment. The pre-production plastic pellets, called nurdles, are melted down to make plastic goods. They’ve now traveled more than 300 kilometres, as the crow flies, from the Lake’s northern shore to its eastern tip.

Nurdles aren’t merely unsightly litter. Like other plastic pollutants, they soak up any toxins in the water, such as PCBs and dioxin. If fish ingest the plastics, the toxins can enter the food chain. Unfortunately, says Dr. Lorena Rios Mendoza, that’s exactly what happens.

Fish often mistake plastic particles for food, says Lorena, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Superior who studies microplastics – particles 5 millimetres or smaller – in the Great Lakes.

“And, at the end, we’re in trouble because we eat the fish,” she adds. When she examined the stomachs of more than 100 Lake Superior fish, Lorena found plastic fibers in nearly 20 percent of them.

Microbeads, bits of plastic used in some toothpastes and beauty products, are a common source of microplastic pollution. Tiny and buoyant, they often pass through water treatment filters.

“Communities have to know that they can’t use these products because it all goes to the Lake,” says Lorena.

Wisconsin banned microbeads in July; stores must pull such products from shelves by 2019. At the time of this writing, similar bans had been proposed in Michigan, Minnesota and Ontario.

Lake Superior contains less plastic pollution than most of the other Great Lakes. But once they’re in the water, microplastics are nearly impossible to clean up en masse – and they’re not biodegradable. Lake Superior has thousands of these tiny particles per square kilometre. “That’s why we need to stop the source,” says Lorena.

Nurdle pollution hasn’t received the same level of scrutiny, largely because they’re not nearly as abundant in the Great Lakes. Lorena, in fact, was surprised to learn that the pellets had been found on Lake Superior. Jeremy’s hope is that, by strengthening measures to keep them out of the Lake, nurdles will never be more than an oddity for beachgoers of the future, found in ever fewer numbers.