Trash is purposely being dumped into Lake Ontario

You may see more trash in the Great Lakes this summer due to a group purposely dumping plastic bottles into Lake Ontario, but there's more to the littering than it seems.

When you see people discard plastic bottles in oceans and lakes, your initial reaction is that the trash doesn't belong there, but before you make a call to the Environmental Protection Agency, a group at the University of Toronto who is doing the littering says this effort could actually help lead to a healthier lake.

The group of students, researchers and volunteers at the University of Toronto -- called the U of T Trash Team -- are dumping plastic bottles with GPS trackers to pinpoint exactly where trash goes in the water to help determine ways to retrieve it.

Cassandra Sherlock with the University of Toronto Trash Team told AccuWeather National Reporter Emmy Victor how this experiment could in fact help the lake become a cleaner body of water.

The University of Toronto Trash Team member Cassandra Sherlock. (Image via U of T Trash Team)

"While in these discussions, they said 'It'd be really cool to throw something in the lake and see where it ends up. Based on where it starts, and where it goes. And that can maybe tell us more about litters' behavior,'" Sherlock said.

Sherlocks says, as part of a mission to learn where trash ends up in Lake Ontario, the team threw more than two dozen plastic bottles into the water, all with GPS trackers inside.

The GPS-tracked "Blender Bottle" water bottles represent floating litter in the Toronto harbor. The University of Toronto will follow their travels to reveal movement patterns and potential accumulation zones for floating litter. This will allow us to better understand local sources of litter and help inform future placement of trash capture devices (like Seabins) to divert litter from Lake Ontario. (Image via U of T Trash Team)

"The goal and the aim of this project is to reveal the pathways of litter in the Toronto harbor so we can better understand the local sources of litter and help inform how to tackle our pollution problem," Sherlock said.

Every hour, the trackers report where the bottles are, helping determine where they end up over time, and how they travel along the way.

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"When you see a bottle stuck on the side of a beach for four days, you think, 'Okay, it's probably wedged in some rocks, and then all of a sudden it's rained and then it's made its way all the way across the harbor," Sherlock said.

The project, which is set to run through August, also includes cleaning up the trouble spots.

"If we see an accumulation point that we see is common from that sourcepoint, we want to put a trash capture device there, so it doesn't pollute the rest of Lake Ontario," Sherlock said.

To make sure people don't actually mistake these bottles for trash, the group put a message in the bottles that reads: This bottle is tracking how plastic pollution travels. Please do not touch. This bottle is actively being tracked and monitored and will be recovered. Property of the University of Toronto Trash team.

The GPS-tracked "Blender Bottle" water bottles represent floating litter in the Toronto harbor. The University of Toronto will follow their travels to reveal movement patterns and potential accumulation zones for floating litter. This will allow us to better understand local sources of litter and help inform future placement of trash capture devices (like Seabins) to divert litter from Lake Ontario. (Image via U of T Trash Team)

Once the data is collected, the bottles won't remain in the water.

"They're going to go out in boats - and collect all of the bottles - when they're done with the study so we're not further polluting our lake," Sherlock said.

The university plans to use the information to create long-term solutions to reduce plastic pollution throughout the Great Lakes.

Follow along below to see where the bottles have traveled to thus far.

Reporting by Emmy Victor.

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