The air quality inside Toronto’s subway has always been poor, particularly on Line 2 that runs East-West along Bloor St. The concentration of tiny particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, is around 10 times higher than what is typically seen outdoors, and is higher than many other subway systems around the world. Read more in CIC […]
pollution
Cleaning water with quantum chemistry
When Diana Virgovicova was 14 she travelled to India with her mother. She saw rivers so polluted they were black. “That’s when the idea was born,” she says. “I decided I wanted to spend my life cleaning dirty water.” Read more in CIC News.
How safe are Great Lakes fish to eat? Depends on who you ask
Catching and eating fish is a way of life for many people around the Great Lakes and connecting St. Lawrence River, but decades of industrial pollution have made it unsafe to eat too many, too often. The advice about how many and how often can vary wildly depending on which jurisdiction, even though the fish […]
Slippery coating could help reduce microplastic shedding from clothes
Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a way to help reduce one of the biggest sources of the plastic pollution choking our oceans: not single-use straws or bags, but tiny fibres shed from synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon. Read more in CIC News.
Some banned pesticides fade from Great Lakes air, while others persist
Two recently banned pesticides have all but disappeared from the atmosphere around the Great Lakes, while others phased out decades ago are still hanging around. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
Mercury in fish may not be as bad as we thought
Mercury, especially in its organic methylmercury form, is well known to cause severe problems in the brain – famously, Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter is thought to be a victim of mercury poisoning. Because mercury in the environment – both from natural sources and from pollution – can find its way into the food we […]
Study: Fish can recover from mercury pollution faster than thought
Mercury pollution remains a problem in many parts of the Great Lakes, but new research from Canada’s Experimental Lakes Area in northern Ontario shows that efforts to reduce the amount of mercury going into a lake can have quick and dramatic effects on the levels of the pollutant in fish populations. Read more in Great Lakes […]
Bacteria Cleanup: Should we let nature clean up oil spills?
Natural populations of oil-degrading bacteria could help to clean up freshwater rivers and lakes after spills from pipelines and trains, researchers have found after experiments that simulated spills in a Canadian lake. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
Oil Spills’ Overlooked Victims: Water Insects
New research shows how oil spills and their cleanup harm water striders, raising questions about the broader ecological impacts of even small spills. The dangers of freshwater oil spills to fish and birds are well known, but what about the other creatures, like insects, that live in or on rivers and lakes? Tyler Black, a […]
Lingering Chemicals: Legacy pollutants continue to haunt the Great Lakes
Long-lived chemicals that were banned years or even decades ago in the U.S. and Canada are still turning up in the bodies of fish and migrating terns in the Great Lakes, and they continue to affect the health of those threatened birds. Read more in Great Lakes Now.