so we're going to welcome you officially to day two of the trapping trash and diverting it from our waterways workshop we're so happy to have you back this workshop as you know is all about capacity building and learning about trash trapping as a solution to the global issue of plastic pollution and we want to welcome back those of you who we got to meet yesterday and welcome to those of you who are joining us just for today we want to thank you so much for joining and um we have just had each of you kind of sharing where you're from i haven't had a look at the results now so i'm going to put them on the screen to see where people are joining us from today okay so um we had one of these yesterday and so as chelsea explained is the word cloud so the bigger the word the more people have entered it so we have a pretty fair amount of people from north america spread across the us and canada um a few other canadian locations listed within here but we also have some groups joining from namibia portugal malaysia the uk oh it's moving romania netherlands brazil that's amazing um so i actually i enjoy seeing this move so if if you haven't if you just joined us there's a link in the chat that you can go to enter click that link or go to mentee.com and use this code to let us know where you're from and we'll save a copy of this great okay i'll go back to our presentation that's amazing as you can see it's certainly been a great uh global workshop for us to meet all of you from here in our in our spot in canada so before we continue i do want to say it's very important for us to recognize the history of the lands we call home so as we have people from all over the world we also want to extend our acknowledgements to the indigenous and traditional paths across all territories for our team we're actually speaking specifically to the land on which the university of toronto operates and for thousands of years it is being the traditional land of the huron wendell the seneca and most recently the mississaugas of the credit river and today this meeting place is still home to many indigenous people from across turtle island we're so grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land um to reintroduce myself i'm susan i'm one of the co-founders of the university of toronto trash team i'll be facilitating some of the sessions today and i'm joined by other members of our team who i'll introduce and prior to my time with the work with this work i spent about over a decade with the great canadian shoreline cleanup which is a program that also contributes to the international coastal cleanup so we're joined by members of our team to also help facilitate and lead some sessions chelsea rockman rafaela gutierrez and cassandra sherlock um chelsea is an assistant professor at the university of toronto she's also a scientific advisor to the ocean conservancy and has been researching the sources sinks and ecological implications of plastic debris for more than a decade rafaela has also spent a decade studying local development programs for low-income communities in brazil to improve the socioproductive integration of waste pickers into formal recycling streams and cassandra has completed her bsc in ecology and evolutionary biology just this past june and since then has spent the past year studying floatable debris in the toronto harbor playing a key role in developing data protocols for trash capture devices which you will hear a lot about in our sessions later this afternoon and again i'd like to thank those who have helped make this workshop possible that support from our collaborators and supporters uh so i'd like to thank again ports toronto ocean conservancy and environment and climate change canada's great lake office for their support of this workshop so speaking of the workshop we've seen these before so i'll go over it quickly because i know we're eager to get into it our main objectives again is to include sharing the value of trash trapping devices and their role in fighting plastic pollution and really motivating collaboration between all of us as we share the lessons that we've learned and learn from you and then ultimately work towards building a network that works as we work independently but collectively and those details will learn um throughout the day so yesterday we covered our collective vision for trash trapping technology and heard some stories from projects currently in motion and then today we're going to actually get more hands-on into the steps with some discussion and then an introduction to the global network that we have mentioned over the course of yesterday so we have a big day planned i'll go when to a look more specifically we're currently doing our welcome and icebreaker so when that wraps we'll turn things over to cassandra who will go through some of the recipe and steps for building trash trapping projects and then we're going to break into discussion groups so on the next slide i'll talk about how that'll work so this will take place in three separate breakout rooms um when we get actually it's time for this we will go over these instructions again but the main thing to remember is once you're put into a room you will stay in that same room the entire time and then the facilitators for each topic will move every 30 minutes so that you get and learn about a new part of the puzzle and then we'll start to talk things out and open the conversation that will be followed by a break we have a pretty packed um first half so we'll go for a break and then we'll come back and hear from each of the groups um to learn kind of the key communications and questions that started to come up and then we will wrap things up with um chelsea we'll be leaving the digest to tie it all together and then i will conclude everything with just a recap and reminder of our next steps so in some of the sessions when there's q a this is a reminder of how that will happen the breakout rooms might happen a little bit differently but probably about the same those facilitators will go through their their preferred steps but uh when it's time for q a if you want to ask a question out loud you can raise your hand and we will look through the list and take you off mute in order and then we'll go back and forth between those questions and anything in the chat and we will also try to answer questions as we see them if we're able to we'd also love if you share the conversation throughout the workshop we are tweeting what's happening you can use the trash uh trapping trash hashtag and uh you can see all of the accounts that you can follow the u of t trash team will be sending out most the majority of tweets for today but we'd love to hear from you okay so we're ready almost to start but we have a bit of a pop quiz um we are curious to know from this is from some of our work uh just to kind of get a sense of how much about trash trapping data you might already know and you'll learn the story behind this infographic later today and how we got to these numbers but we're just curious if you can guess which item made the number three spot so we're going to open a poll uh in zoom so i'm just launching that now okay um so you should have a poll popping up and i'll give it um 30 seconds or so to see how many people answer and we'll see if we're able to guess from these options what the number three item was and this is in toronto um in the outer harbor marina where we were doing our work with ports toronto and that was from the 2020 field season okay more than half of you have voted so i'll end the pool in about 10 seconds okay 10 i'm gonna count on my head okay five four three two one okay that will share the results so uh most the majority of people hopefully you can see these results um half of you thought it was just under half thought plastic bottles followed by 22 percent um oh it doesn't listed in order that's funny um 23 foam 22 pellets about the same and cigarette butts is the last item so i will stop sharing the poll so i can get back to the presentation okay let's see if you were right the answer was pellets so we did find plastic bottles we did find all of these items but what we were surprised to see is that these were actually able to capture plastic pellets some of them are smaller forms of plastics and you will hear a lot about the role that natural vegetation might have played in this but i won't steal cassandra's thunder for when she shares a little bit more about this but i will turn it over to her now for our next session okay great thanks susan so i'm just gonna share my screen can everyone see my presentation awesome okay okay hi everyone welcome to this recipe for success session so you want a trash trap to start we've outlined a recipe for you all to follow and adjust based on your tastes and what your kitchen can handle for those of you who are avid bakers you know that you have to follow a recipe to a tea in order for the final product to come out perfect but here we're just providing you with some rough guidelines to have a successful trash trapping project and giving you all the opportunity to learn from some of our mistakes and make note of some aspects we didn't quite consider so what do you need for a trash trapping project so you'll need a trash capture device a body of water to put it in a team as passionate as you are funding a big bucket of motivation and optimism and that's essentially it next throughout the presentation we'll go through the steps on how to utilize your ingredients for successful trash trapping project so first you want to identify the problem so if you're here at our workshop it's most likely you know you have a trash problem in your area you take walks along lake coast or river and you see there's trash accumulating this very well may be a hot spot and a great place to put a trash capture device but there is something else you might want to consider prior to just putting it in the first place that you see where garbage ends up you want to assess your watershed so this will allow you to gain an understanding of where litter is coming from what are its sources what types of plastic waste and litter are you most commonly seeing you must first identify these in order to optimize on your location for your trash capture device to be able to remove it from your waterways so depending on your region there may be multiple sources whether it's a river creek or it might be due to the high population density on your water body in which you'll want to emphasize the community outreach aspect um and encourage behavioral change throughout your trash trapping project so within your watershed there will be sources hot spots transports and sinks so starting off source points they are always a priority to place a trash capture device as they'll catch and remove the litter before it further pollutes your watershed next would be sites of plastic transport so these are usually clear pathways of where plastic moves from one point to another and rivers are a great example of this next is hot spots so this is where trash tends to accumulate at large rates but it's not its final destination so if left on touch it might continue to travel through the watershed after a big storm or just due to the current and wind conditions and sinks are where it's the end point for litter so where it often gets accumulated and it doesn't move locations easily so each of these possible locations of plastic that we just discussed often overlap sites of transport can be hot spots hot spots can also be sinks and these are just general definitions to help you understand the fate of plastic pollution and to understand when placing a trash capture device in the region tackling each and any of these will still make an impact so next you want to consider and understand what types of conditions you have in your water body is there a lot of aquatic vegetation what are the wind and water currents like taking note of the seasons in your region for example does your water body become frozen over this will help you think about what devices may be more feasible another important note is does your water body have the infrastructure for a trash capture device if so what type of device can your water body hold as rafaela mentioned yesterday we wanted to place a mr trash wheel in our harbor but due to all the construction that was being done near a large source point of litter to our harbor it wasn't possible so we had to rethink so to understand the different sites and conditions in your area you can try and google local ngos in your area to see if they've published a watershed assessment or reported certain outflows of litter from a certain point look for a water watershed assessment model for your region this may be provided by your local government to help you understand water flow in your watershed and can help identify potential source points hotspots transports and sinks and researchers are also working really hard in developing models to predict surface transport of plastic pollution to identify where they are accumulating the most given wind and current patterns but until that is more widely available and if there is no open data available to you from some local volunteer groups or if there's no water watershed assessment tool we have developed an easy method to determine where to place your devices and get the most bang for your buck we have developed what we call the visual audit so this is where you just essentially visually observe the litter present in your water body by recording the types and amount of litter that you see in your local water body you can conduct this a few times throughout the year or season to understand how litter accumulates and changes depending on the season or after rainfall this will also help inform you on the type of device you should be considering should it be mobile or stationary this protocol will be found on our website and included in the resource package given after the workshop so the next ingredient that we want to implement is creating your dream team so from yesterday's presentation we heard many stories from each of our speakers engaging with multiple different stakeholders and we see that their projects are successful so how do you create your own dream team you want to identify local stakeholders in your region this may be a marina local government volunteer cleanup groups ngos businesses along the waterfront or even fishermen and other avid waterway users so as there are many economic and social implications with plastic pollution you want to ensure to sell the benefits of a trash capture device as it will help restore the water body to what it once was and it's a long-term solution as you bring people together and all these local stakeholders in this project you want to make sure it reaches as many people as possible to help it grow next you want to consider maintaining roles and responsibilities so in your trash trapping project you want to ensure that everyone feels that they have a significant part in this initiative and ensure that you have enough stakeholders motivated to collaborate in a project as there are many roles to play so going over the first one is the operator so who will know how the device functions who can fix it when something goes wrong and who has machinery to possibly remove and deploy the trash capture device if need be who can help assess best points of placement and help identify technical issues next to think about is who's going to maintain this ebin or sorry the trash capture device in a broad case those who maintain it will be cleaning it out daily or however often the debris needs to be removed and maintained and ensure that everything is functioning properly next you want to think about your waste characterization team who's going to collect the daily data using our simple data protocol which we'll find out about next section who will collect the data using our detailed protocol which requires quantification and characterization of the litter five to ten times a season or year and who's going to compile that data and send it to the network and lastly you want to identify who will be working on communicating the project to your local community and organize outreach events and opportunities around the device who will help create signage and tell this story to your local community about diverting plastic pollution so once you've completed your watershed assessment you've created your dream team it's time to pick the device all together in your team so what seems to be the best device for you you want to think about the environment you're in do you get snow or ice what type of aquatic organic material is present in your area what's the weather like these are important considerations for the maintenance and storage of your device once you pick the device that you think is best do you have an idea of where you want to place the device in your region and do you have the capacity to operate it for example does it need external energy source can you provide this do you have a reliable form of labor to maintain the device over time based on the capabilities of your team it might benefit more from a manual or autonomous device devices with larger holding capacities require less frequent collection whereas smaller devices require more attention and collections depending on how polluted your area is it's important to remember that fit for purpose statement we want to emphasize that having a trash capture device no matter the size will still make a measurable difference okay so now you have your team your ideal device it's time to start thinking about funding what can your team afford so many of the cheaper devices are valued around ten thousand dollars and this does not consider maintenance or operational costs does someone in your team have the machinery if required to deploy and retrieve the cap trash capture device you want to try and put your heads together and identify funding sources and plan for that long-term maintenance and if there is little to no funding but volunteers are available you and your team can consider manual debris collection efforts using low-cost devices examples of this include booms or litter traps or even diy trash capture devices you want to get creative and lastly you want to ensure that you use your device to the fullest extent it's important to recognize that this is not only a technology that removes litter but it can be used as a research tool and act as a centerpiece for education and outreach to engage your local community in a collaborative initiative by engaging the public you can bring awareness to solutions that individuals can have starting at the home and educate them on common sources and types of plastic litter in our waterways studies have shown that when outreach is partnered with innovation and waste management the plastic waste reduction is increased more versus when it's just innovation with no outreach okay so this recipe has been created from many different attempts and it's still going to need tweaks and adjusting throughout the years as we discover new ingredients needed to make this as successful as possible with your help thus far some of the things we've realized we needed to add and think about are maintaining roles and responsibilities we learned that it's extremely important that everyone have their set roles and takes responsibility for what they're assigned to or else the project is not as effective as intended make sure you maintain relationships with your team so that everyone is held accountable for their part establishing these roles will make the process much smoother in the end next is identifying your native vegetation so we found that vegetation can damage our trash capture device easily if left unmaintained for a long period of time and due to some local vegetation like pine trees their needles were able they were small enough and able to breach the mesh and cause damage to our pump so placing the device far from these trees would help avoid the issue and lastly uh we found in the fall that we had some dead fish accumulate in our bins and if this occurs you want to keep an eye on the area for us we realized it was unlikely that our device caused this as the fish can outswim the current that the pump creates and it was more likely due to poor water quality this may not be the case for other devices so it's important to note and if this occurs more than once you may consider moving your device to another area to avoid any impact on aquatic organisms okay so with all of that now i actually want to open the floor to all of you and hear from those of you who have had the opportunity to operate and own a trash capture device and hear what your lessons learnt are for example was there anything you'd like to share that might be beneficial for new trash capture device owners to expect or anticipate when owning a device and something you wish you'd known before owning and running a trash capture device now before i turn the floor over to all of you i just want to remind you to save any questions that you may have from this session for the ingredients that the ingredient session which is next our facilitators will go into much more detail and from what i've just explained so your questions will be better answered by them so is there anyone who would like to share first and if you don't want to raise your hand and share your hap you're welcome to just type it in the chat as well sorry i'm just trying to open my chat here to see if there's anything going on hi cassandra hi there hi uh so this is romel nandy i run the trashy waters program at u.s epa so i have not operated a trash trap myself personally but we certainly have been involved with trash capture projects around the united states and one thing um you may have touched on this i i may have missed it cassandra but uh one thing i think people have to be cognizant of is the maintenance aspect how frequently is the trap trash capture device you are using how frequently does it need to be cleaned out is that something you can do yourself or is it something you may actually need a professional contractor to do right um even the installation aspect some of these things are some devices are fairly easy to install some are much more complicated and so i think those are aspects that people need to be cognizant of when they're choosing their trash capture device that's a great point especially when it comes to seasonal differences if you have to pull it out and put it back in that might add a significant cost to the to the project as well so that's a great point i have i see someone else if you want to unmute um i can only see town of the here i will understand it's jason [Music] i think someone was speaking but they might be can you hear me now i can yes okay it's jason from the tunnel of the mountains for the thornbury harbor we just started with the boating ontario um clean coastal clean or the great lakes clear great cleanup program we just started last year we're still waiting on a few things for the measures but we we were collecting it and um with a little bit of i.t issues with the app from irit department not allowing us to use it for the iphone but with the trash collector like you said uh having your knowledge of what uh where to put the trash collector uh we have the c-bin with this group it's worked great we did collect a lot of stuff we didn't see some microplastics in thinking we wouldn't uh and it's nice to have your input to help us with the location we just sent you a picture of the harbor we knew where plastic would collect and on along our one bank in the harbor and it's been great asset and then we're starting to really try to promote it within our town but yeah once we get the a little bit more of the package just because it was such a slow um we were late getting rolled out into it so we're just looking forward to be part of this and moving forward with it and my staff all know that we're going to be cleaning it out once a day and uh like the previous speaker was saying like the cleaning and maintenance just to make sure it's done every day uh if we know where the storm is going to be coming then we have to just make sure make sure it's cleaned out prior to the storm event or actually just taking it out once a month or get a scrub brush and just cleaning it so it's actually not full of um the sediment that just sits and collects on those devices just like anybody any harbor boat that doesn't get moved all that dirt just sticks to it so just making it clean and presentable somebody who walks by then they can see it so sorry taking too long so no that's great no all the things you're saying are definitely things to consider especially when you're new to having a device and you find all these things out so that's really great to hear and it's a good point about the storm events i know from um when we were dealing with this event i believe it was in june or early summer the marina was emptying it out sometimes three times a day depending on the location and where the wind was going so um yeah that's really great to hear that your team's on it i'm excited to see more yeah thank you is there anyone else i don't know if there's anything in the chat going on you've got a couple in the chat cassie um one is from katie register and i invited her to unmute herself and share it if she wants to um if not i'm happy to read it for her yeah this is katie can you hear me hi katie yes um yeah so we worked with the group to install some sea bins and their plan was to use volunteers to empty the sea bins daily or as needed and that was the plan but legal folks said no it had to be paid trained staff because of liability so uh that's something that i encourage people to look into before they do their budget because that made it really difficult for staff to do for sure that's a great point and um yeah that might be variable depending on the organization so thanks for sharing that another one from uh well you have one from sally and one from gloria do either of you want to mute yourself and share okay i'm gonna try i'm so good sorry hi couldn't find the mic to unmute me it's gloria here hi gloria hi um i'm managing a project for an organization called southeast previous trust is a plastic prevention preventing plastic pollution in rivers and aquatic environment project and we're working with other 17 organizations across france in the uk and so the whole purpose of the project is to trial and test a lot of different types of intervention including booms and seed beans and cages and all these type of traps but then once the funding would be over and the project will be concluded and we will have drawn our conclusions what we are experiencing as a partnership is that it's really hard to provide long-term sustainability for all these interventions because local partners are not all of the local partners can afford to run the team to maintain the infrastructure in the future so this is the main thing we are struggling with at the moment because we wouldn't like to um to install something that works well uh just up until the end of the project and then it's kind of um led to itself uh because of funding issues thank you for sure thanks for sharing gloria that's really important to consider and um hopefully we'll go into a little bit in the sessions as well thinking about that long-term sustainable funding so you can keep those trash traps in your water bodies so thank you um i see another hand raised would you like to go ahead and unmute yourself and share hey this is sally i'm not sure if you guys can hear me now i can yes hi sally hey i just took off um my bluetooth um yeah so we're doing some work with marina here in um on vancouver island and this marina had previously installed a seabin about two years ago and they had done kind of their own data collection and figured that it was a good option for them and then that's why we decided as a non-profit to work with them and donate a sieben to their marina and now we have actually two in their marina so they have three sea bins in total now um we kind of have a relationship where they have a maintenance team that goes out every day and empties the bin twice and they have a workshop at the marina to obviously fix boats and things like that and they were able to kind of fit something to help this evening installed on their property and they don't spend they don't have too many costs in terms of electricity bills i know from speaking with the marina manager but yeah it's kind of the maintenance side we left with them and external kind of maintenance costs they would cover but we are with our project kind of donating the seabins that we raise money for and then um that's our contribution plus the research side of it so that's kind of a relationship that we worked out with them that's a and that's a great relationship and and it's great that you brought this up to kind of contrast what i just presented instead of just creating your own you can go and find somebody who's already started and see how you can contribute and and bring more awareness to your local community and add that data collection aspect so that's really great to hear awesome thanks thank you for sharing okay i think we have time for maybe one more um i see a hand raised here uh jeff kerr here hi jeff hi um we're in cambridge ontario my company is the representative and the distributor for the lid trap so we've been watching intently awesome um my question i guess uh refers more to uh the municipal usage of the litter trap and in the public awareness um idea that municipalities like to have the public aware of the initiatives they're taken and they're taking and the litter trap as a unit is designed to go into the catch basins to catch the garbage they're not all that visible so um i think municipalities would be more on board with a litatrap if they can bring it to the attention of them to the citizens by putting some kind of identification on say the curb where you've got the lidded traps saying this is a catch basin ludetrap uh project that may go over well with municipalities again it's bringing the awareness to the public that the storm drains are carrying a lot of garbage down and into the watersheds for sure so having some kind of marker on the uh the catch basin as a catch basin that catches garbage might help with awareness yeah that's a great point and for people who are creating teams again emphasizing that outreach um aspect and that's a really great time to get creative and as you're saying jeff you know how do you bring awareness something that might be a little more hidden like a little trap yeah it's just a thought for the peaceful people here for sure thank you thank you okay so i think that's all the time we have for now and i'm going to pass it back to chelsea to introduce our next session great thank you cassie i'm going to share my screen hopefully everyone can see a slide cassie you want to give me a thumbs up if you can or just say yes yes awesome okay thank you all right so the purpose of this next session is really now to take a deeper dive into the three important well there are probably more than three but into three important aspects of owning and operating a trash trap so some of you were already starting to allude to many of these questions both yesterday as well as today in the chat and we're hoping here we can start answering some of them for you through the presentations plan and also a q a so within this session we're actually going to split into three topics and you're going to get to hear about each of them so three breakout rooms are about to be created and we will randomly sort you into three separate groups the purpose of this is to allow for smaller groups so that you can feel more engaged and have more of a conversation you don't have to ever switch breakout rooms once you're assigned to one you go there you stay there and the panelists the facilitators from each topic will come to you so we will rotate and you'll stay and once we're done you'll go back into the main room and actually um have a break so let me just go over what this session i will cover first before we send you off so first of all the session will cover ownership and operation and this will be led by mike david from ports toronto and kathy lammers and andrew bellay from trent port marina the second session will be all about data collection and research and it will be led by cassandra sherlock who you just heard from rafaela gutierrez both from the u of t trash team and also sarah colar from the ocean conservancy the third session is all about outreach and communication and this will be led by susan debert sunny from the u of t trash team jessica pellerin from ports toronto and robin stegman from ocean conservancy with the past working uh as mr trashwheel twitter twitter mr trashel she can tell you all about it and share her lessons learned so just to give you a bit of what this session will look like so each session will be run slightly differently and that's just to mix it up keep you on your toes and each will be 30 minutes at the end of each 30 minutes again we will rotate and you will stay put then you're gonna have a 15 minute break and then when you come back they'll just be a quick overview highlight of the session purpose of that is that questions may come up uniquely in some sessions that aren't set in others which might be something that the facilitators want to share with the group so if something comes up in one of their three sessions they'll have an opportunity to share it then so that's how this session is going to run i'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen and anusha who has been the person tweeting behind this is going to now be the person who separates us um into our breakout rooms and sends us on our way so when you get invited to attend a breakout room just click join and we will get started hey everyone i think it is time to come back if you're here if you could just throw up a thumbs up or some sort of reaction by just clicking on the reactions on the on the bottom and letting us know you're back and ready to go awesome great okay so the purpose of this next session is actually to finish up the last session so the purpose of the last session was really to be able to dive into the weeds a little bit about what it means to own a trash trap how do you deal with the ownership and operations how do you manage the data collection and and and how do you benefit from its ability to uh be a really good tool for community communications and outreach so what we're going to do for the next 15 minutes is i'm just going to give the leads of each session some time to sort of report out on some of the highlights from their session we realize you saw one of the three repeats of each session and of course different questions come up in different ones and different points are raised so the purpose of this is really to be able to have them share what they thought were some of the highlights i think our data collection leaders are still in their room figuring out what it is they want to say but i'm going to turn it over first to kathy who was leading the operation the ownership and operations session to tell us a bit about some of the highlights from that session kathy over to you great thanks very much chelsea uh yeah it was really interesting we had a lot of interesting questions come up some overlap and some different in each session i think one of the biggest ones was costs people wanted to know what does it cost to purchase these devices um and what does it cost to operate them so i think we figured out that um the lita traps for example we're talking about two different devices that we work with the little traps probably cost up to about a thousand dollars to install and operate um maintenance costs are very very low for the litter traps um whereas the c bin for example could be ten to fifteen thousand dollars and maintenance costs are relative the costs of operating and maintaining the the c-bin are much much greater than that of a lidar trap so that's something that people need to be aware obviously there's all kinds of different trapping device much bigger costs associated with purchasing and then again with operating um so there's all kinds of options out there but cost is definitely something that people are aware of um in line with that is another question that came up or that we asked actually is how many people uh obtained their trash trapping devices through grant money or through programs such as funded programs or how many people just went out and purchased them and interestingly in all three of our different sessions virtually everybody had uh grant money to help them get into operation with their trash trapping devices only i think three total over the three sessions actually purchased them themselves so that's a big consideration and i think it's something that is an important lesson i think it shows that people are much more likely to get involved initially at least in trash trapping if they can have some grant money government and perhaps even municipal government get involved and start some programs to make it more viable for people to start trash trapping another takeaway was research i think across the board a lot of people felt that it was important to be involved in the research and that's such an important aspect of it so it's it's great especially if you've got grant money you're you're more likely probably to be involved in a research project but it helps to motivate the program it helps keeping your keep your staff motivated knowing that they're actually contributing to something they're not just taking out the trash every day but they're doing it for a reason and a purpose so that's something that people seemed interested in knowing about the research programs and finally the last one that we didn't necessarily get out of the program the three sessions itself but something we've thought about is that we've learned so much from mike and andrew and i have learned so much from each other in these sessions and and leading up to all of this um and preparing for it we've learned so much and we feel it would be really important to have some sort of networking um opportunity out there whether it's you know there's many different platforms you can do it on but rather than me learning something and then passing it on to the next person and the next person if we had one resource we could go to where we could all share what we've learned as we go along it could be invaluable and that probably has to be an ngo or perhaps something like the great lakes plastic cleanup project could help with that but somewhere that we can all go to and just share information and get information obviously manufacturers probably wouldn't want to provide that because they're a little bit in competition um but anyway we think that that would be a really important thing too so i think those are our major takeaways um and we just want to share it with you wonderful thank you so much kathy that was great our next group would be the group that was uh looking at data collection and research so i'm not sure whether raphael or cassie or sarah will share but over to you hi can you hear me yes we can we can we can share it together if necessary so we have a couple of different questions uh was all very interesting some of them was uh related to volunteers how we can train them uh to do the data collection uh and our suggestions to all of you it's we have the training uh we have some tutorials in our website with some videos how to how to collect the data what you need to do it all the materials but we also can provide some uh insights you can maybe have a zoom call or something like that if you have any trouble and we can help you uh if you are in the field we could help you with that that but we have all all the information it's provided in our website that we will show later and also we have some questions about um one was very interesting uh from uh john the trash wheels uh that he made sure that the protocol was great but i'm not sure that we could you apply this to a large volume with the that trash will collect and that's it's a very valid point and our what we we want with the protocol is try to adapt as much as possible for all the uh different uh trash uh devices out there trash trapping device other and uh sub sampling it's a good way to do it as well so we can we could start some sampling that would make yeah uh your collection data collection easier uh for the for the waste characterization uh and then it's we have another question about if there is a plan for for the data to be submitted uploaded by the our network to be reported publicly to better understand the whole network's impact and yes that's our goal so we want to provide reports and make everything public in our website and people would have access as much as possible in all the data uh and i think that's the main things a we learn a lot through this this process and uh i think if sarah and cassie wants to compliment and say something that i forgot but i think that was the main discussions yeah that was awesome and we had one other question asking about data trapper whether it will be on a global scale and as the most locations look like they're in toronto and that is for sure the case um you just need to when you upload the app abroadville's email will be um at the bottom there and you just need to email her your location your cbn id um and then we'll be able to add you on the app and you can collect your daily data exactly it's very quickly you just send me an email i will reply i will put your information in the app that's it i think that was our main discussion wonderful sarah did you have anything to add no just thank you everyone for your questions and contributions awesome okay then our final group will be the communications and outreach group so that is led by susan robin and jess great uh we had a lot of fun talking with people about communication ideas um two questions that seem to come up a lot was one a question about um animals uh and what happens like are trash strappers going to affect marine life um and what happens and i i will say that generally um there isn't an issue like the trash rule for instance moves very slowly so unless an animal was very sick it would be able to swim out of the way and a lot of trash trapper devices are similar um i will say as somebody who has been in situations where a python crawls onto your trash trapper or um ducks decide to play in your conveyor belt as fun it is something that could happen and having a plan both how you're going to address it in communications internally and having somebody who's able for quick response to go out to that trash device and try to save that creature is really important um to do because you never know like somebody can take a picture of it and tweet it out and all of a sudden 100 people have seen it before you've seen it and so really being able to have a plan so that you can have a quick response especially if your trash trapper is in a high traffic foot traffic area um where people are seeing it you know it's very possible that somebody else walking by is going to see it before you so making sure you have that plan in place is important and then the other question that we got um a lot of uh people asking about was about whether or not having a trash trapper actually hurts behavior change campaigns because people see it as um as a situation where oh that trash wrapper is handling my trash so i don't have to handle my trash um and i'll i can speak personally and then i can open it up to my co-presenters if they want to chime in as well that at least for the trash we didn't see that in fact we saw the opposite that um being able to see the problem and having new attention being directed at that the threshold brought to the problem inspired a lot more people to look at ways that they could affect the issue of ocean plastic pollution at home and so it instead was a spotlight that really uh encouraged people and people didn't and people necessarily like always saw themselves as part of the solution and i think that's true just on communication that when people people are more likely to see themselves as part of the solution than part of the problem so people are less likely to see it as like oh well somebody's like picking up all the litter i throw everywhere every day and more seeing it are like oh that's really cool i want to i want to be part of that and i want to be part of that solution other folks wanted to chime in there jessica i know you had some notes down no i think you summarized it really well um yeah great susan anything to add from you uh just echoing what robin was sharing on that second question that popped up a lot too is you know we're in toronto with the stevens we're still a few years in so we're newer to this but we even with that shorter time frame we're still seeing the spotlight that it brings to the issue and not so much that now the bins are taking care of everything so i can continue on with all of the same things i'm doing um but that being said i think that's a really interesting opportunity for everyone is to think of what is that best message that gets to that aspect that helps us realize that no one-size-fits-all means that these devices are part of you know a line of different types of things like community cleanups and working to reduce what's being created as materials so there's you know to look at everything as a holistic approach i think what's that message that grabs that attention and focuses it that way but it was really great to speak with everyone and hear some stories from groups of what they've been working with a lot of similarities wonderful okay thank you all for your wrap-ups hopefully everybody felt like they got a lot out of that session in terms of um really starting to dig into the weeds a little bit i think on trash capture devices and what it really means to own them operate them collect data and use them as a tool for communications and outreach our final session of the day before susan closes us out is really just an overview and a bit of a um introduction into our vision of what's next for all of us together so i'm gonna share my screen and maybe someone can just confirm for me raphaelis i can since i can see you maybe a thumbs up if it's working awesome okay okay so our question or in the next step is the digest and what's next so the purpose here is to tell you all about how we envision moving forward with trash trapping as part of the international coastal cleanup as a partnership between u of t trash team and the ocean conservancy so we started this workshop off by telling you about the problem of plastic pollution and projections of future emissions into our waterways both fresh water and ocean these numbers will continue to rise unless we intervene we shared with you that there are many solutions to the plastic pollution problem and that we all that these all need to occur in parallel and that they all fall into three general bins of mitigation strategies and these are plastic waste reduction plastic waste management and plastic litter cleanup and i think we can all agree that we absolutely need to focus upstream on plastic waste reduction and waste management but because we have so much work to do there will always be cleanup needed at least for quite a bit of time so because cleanup is a really important part of the solution we want to help increase its power globally so a recent study that we worked on suggests that in order to significantly reduce plastic emissions to the oceans we need to increase cleanup by several orders of magnitude from tens of thousands to millions of tons as such our goal is to help do just that although people power through local cleanups is amazing we cannot clean up 24 hours a day seven days a week with everybody out there collecting debris but trash trapping machines can and so we've been inspired by many of you in this room that helped initiate this trash trapping movement our goal now is to help motivate the use of more traps locally and monitor our impact globally into one data set as a measure of success towards our global goal we know that across the world groups have their own networks and projects we respect that and we are thrilled for that our goal is simply to be a catch-all to report total progress across the globe so that we can measure our impact on solving the global plastic problem how will we do this so we hope well right after this meeting we're basically launching a trash trapping network under the umbrella of the international coastal cleanup this will be similar to project aware's dive against debris which is a network of divers that collect debris across the globe and contribute their data also to the international coastal cleanup so our goal is to add to the divers and add to the people doing shoreline cleanups with traps and add the data from traps to increase the amount of cleanup around the world in a few minutes we'd actually like you to help us name this network since we don't see this as belonging to us we really see this as belonging to everyone in this room and beyond as we grow just advanced on its own that's new okay so soon we will we will actually ask you to help us name it um but the network will share protocols for counting and characterizing trash trapped at present our protocols as you saw are best suited for siemens and litter traps but we aim to work with all of you to modify our protocols to meet the meet the needs of other types of traps so we envision us being able to sometimes come to you be able to get to know your litter capture device and help create a network where lots of different types of traps data can be going into our network working with all of you to modify our protocols to meet the needs of other types of traps will allow us to improve our models to estimate our total positive impact in a synthesized way for data reporting we will provide tools to collect data sheets and free applications so at first as you've been told the data will be collected via paper data sheets which will be available on our website as well as the data data trapper app both are free but soon it will also be available in clean slot so we'll be switching over to the clean swell app which right now is currently used for the international coastal cleanup this application is also free the data will then be part of the tides data set which is completely open access and will be used to quantify our mass diverted as well as the top items collected our tools because it's open abscess also helps you keep track of and communicate your own local impact and our global impact will be shared annually in the international coastal cleanup report and also shared throughout the year in different ways via social media and our goal as i said before is truly to build this together with our community starting here uh with this workshop so i'm gonna put a link in the chat and i want you to follow that link and go ahead and vote for the name of the network that you prefer most i'm going to give you about a minute or so to fill this out so if you go ahead and follow this link i'll just pause for a minute and go ahead and fill out the survey thinking about now that you sort of see our vision what do you think is the most appropriate name for this network you'll see some examples within the poll that we've thought of and there's also a place for new names so i'll give a minute for that and then i'll continue on and of course you can continue with the poll it won't go away so again that link is in the chat give you a bit more time okay so it looks like so far we've got at least 40 responses i'm gonna go ahead and continue on but that poll is not closing um until later so you'll have still some time to fill it out throughout today and we'll actually have a look at that around 4 30.
so thank you so much for your input because as i said we do want to build this together so the next question is how can we stay connected so we have the email addresses of everybody who came to our workshop and we'll send out some information about how you can stay on our mailing list so that you can be on a mailing list post workshop so you will have an opportunity to opt out we'll also have a webpage that's full of resources for collecting and reporting data so it'll have protocols for the visual audit protocols for how we do waste characterization both with the simple protocol as well as the most detailed protocol data sheets information for how to get the app etc i'm going to show you what that website looks like right now but i will tell you that of course it's going to change um as we sort out our name but right now that website is hosted on the international coastal cleanups or the ocean conservancy's website near where the international coastal cleanup is hosted so you'll find this here the name will change as well as more information will pop on so we're really excited for that other ways in which we'll stay connected and i think actually this sort of reminds me of a comment from kathy about how can we have some sort of a portal where we all can share lessons learned and ask questions and talk to each other we started a facebook page of course it will also change a name as we have a name but the idea for this is you can use it to communicate with others as well as with us about ideas ask questions etc so this facebook group um you'll get more information on it after the workshop of course once we have a name for it because this name will shift and finally we intend to run more workshops as we grow to increase our impact both in different places around the world noting different time zones so you know one point we'll get up in the middle of the night so others don't have to but also to reconnect and incorporate some of our lessons learned by having workshops again for us to come back to and discuss and learn more and so we really cannot wait to help bring our work together to track and grow our collective impact we want to thank you so much for being here we are really thrilled to get started together and i want to have some time now for q a so before i hand it over to susan to wrap up the entire two-day workshop i'm going to stop sharing my screen and we wanted to be able to have some time for question and answer if a question comes in that i can't answer we'll actually send it over to who i think is best suited for that questions so if we have some questions you can go ahead and type them in the chat or you're welcome to go ahead and raise your hands these could be questions about next steps in terms of a network they could be questions on anything that you've learned in the last two days that you didn't feel clarified um and if we have too many questions we can try to answer them later within the facebook group and if we don't have any questions we'll go ahead to our last session to wrap up any questions from anyone we have one in the chat chelsea uh from sally she asks can anyone recommend the types of grant bodies they approached if we wanted to expand beyond donations sure i can answer that for us and then i'd welcome anybody else to chime in uh so within canada where we have sat i think while environment and canada and environment climate change canada e triple c um has been a granting body for for trash traps as well as the ontario ministry of the environment and potentially ministries of the environment in other provinces um and then of course there are different foundations i think that i would look to in the united states from what we've heard from talking to partners and colleagues is that sea grant has provided some funding for siebens the noaa's marine debris program has a removal and prevention grant that i think is offered every other year but sarah can comment if i got that wrong i think the epa has had grants in the past for removal does anyone else want to chime in about other uh grants granting programs that they're aware of for litter traps oh we're at a beverage association yeah so industry actually that's a really good point okay and while people might be sharing well cassie i guess over to you you wonder if you want to give me that next question sure i'm stepping on toes no uh kelly says thank you so much for all the talks today i learned a lot especially from those who have installed the various trash trap devices are you aware of any community of practices people can join where they can share lessons learned and ask questions in a forum like setting that's a great segue into what we were talking about yeah so we're hoping that the facebook group that we're starting serves that purpose so ideally people join the facebook group that have different types of trash capture devices around the world and as a portal for people to ask questions share information through the private chats and also through what they share and it'll be a private facebook group we will also have an email address which i forgot to mention in this last talk it doesn't exist yet because it will have be our new name and that'll be another way to ask questions of us so hopefully hopefully that helps we're trying to create that form because we agree it's so important other questions cassie no questions but we have some a comment from katie she says great job everyone i learned a lot and i'm very excited that you're joining with ocean concerns d instead of starting yet another separate data collection protocol i need to encourage easier ways to collect and share data yeah i'd actually like to comment on that even though i know it's a comment not a question we thought about this a lot right we are fully aware that different people have different apps and different groups for collecting data we wanted to do this through the international coastal cleanup because it's it's already a group that's collecting this type of data we wanted to add to it even if you have a group that's collecting data i know you then have to send it again but ideally then you also send it to the international coastal cleanup once per year this is actually akin to the great canadian shoreline cleanup in canada uh where the great canadian shoreline cleanup collects our cleanup data from across the country and then also submits it to the icc every single year so that's sort of what we see ourselves sort of synonymous to um as kind of a catch-all so katie thank you for that point and we also want to acknowledge that um we thought about that too and we're trying to do our best without trying to duplicate and i think there's some extra information in the chat of other sources for funding any other questions kathy no other questions i just encourage everyone to take a look at the chat we got some great resources for funding here [Music] and that's about it okay well thank you everyone i'm going to turn it over to susan who's going to close out this entire workshop great so some of this will be a repeat actually of what chelsea shared so just to help us remember it um i just think so much chelsea so a lot of great information and we're really excited to get started so as we come to an end i'd just spend a few minutes recapping what we spent today and yesterday as well as the actual next steps for the network some questions in chat i'll actually be covering now um some specifics as well as some resources that we'll be sharing and then a very quick closing activity so let's just have a look at a summary so this is all of the different sessions we had we covered so much in such a shorter amount of time that i'm sure we could have extended this we've got a lot of larger discussions and successful stories and today we got into the nitty-gritty of things but before we share our final details just a huge thank you to all of the speakers who gave their time for us today and yesterday as well as the support to the workshop from port toronto osha conservancy and environment and climate change canada and also a special thank you to anusha if you've been on social media she's been covering our u of t trash team channel and doing an excellent job um so these are all of the speakers we heard from cassandra today um we heard from cassandra with the suggested recipe for trash trapping projects and our lively discussions um by mike david kathy lammers andrew belege sarah collar cassandra sherlock rafaela gutierrez myself robin segment and jessica pellerin and with some facilitation by chelsea so this is the point in the workshop where we truly are turning it back over to you and our hope is that you can now be motivated and inspired to continue to build the trash trapping projects and help contribute to this network that we're building the collaboration right now is currently between the uft trash team and osha conservancy but it's your participation that helped bring this collective vision um to reality and it's our goal that we have more local projects such as ones you already have or are planning to get started that we can all come together and increase this impact um individually but help synthesize this collective data into something bigger so that we can measure our global impact through the international coastal cleanup i'll be sharing over email you'll receive a resource package which outlines the steps that you see on the screen here um so for step one we're gonna send you an email in the next day or so with instructions on the mailing list and more information about facebook group which is another way to stay connected there was a question in chat about those who may have privacy issues with joining facebook that's what the mailing list will be actually the main form of communication o
2021-03-31