A Greener Future
Established in 2014 and based out of Markham Ontario, A Greener Future has been amongst the forefront of organized efforts towards reducing litter and its impacts on our environment, economy and communities. A Greener Future’s mission consists of providing opportunities while bringing together a strong and inclusive volunteer community. Inspiring action to establish a clean, healthy and sustainable environment that will be prolonged for generations to come.
A Greener Future believes that we all hold a collective duty to engage in environmental stewardship, with a vision of the world where people come together to learn, connect and take effective action towards the litter crisis.
A Greener Future organizes various volunteer based cleanup campaigns. Additionally raising awareness about plastic pollution, cigarette butts and other litter sources around the Great Lakes region. The non-profit places education as a central factor surrounding their initiatives, with the hope to inspire communities to conduct active environmental stewardship activities of their own.
A Greener Future effectively records all litter data gathered from each of their organized cleanups done since 2014. The data allows their team to display the most common items found during cleanups and the quantities collected. Since 2014, over 4 million pieces of litter have been collected and recorded by volunteers.
Campaigns
Love Your Lakes
Nurdle Hunts
Butt Blitz
Love Your Lakes
The Love Your Lakes campaign was started in 2016, and works to protect Canadas Great Lakes and surrounding habitats. Since established, the program has removed over 665,000 pieces of litter around Ontario. Organized events are hosted from May until the end of August each year surrounding the Great Lakes with the help of hundreds of supporting volunteers. The Love Your Lakes campaign also provides critical awareness and education for the public regarding plastic pollution and its impacts within Lake Ontario and beyond.
“This is an annual project that runs from May until August. We coordinate 100 shoreline cleanups, mostly around lake Ontario, though we are now expanding to other lakes.”
“We did 119 cleanups in 100 locations [last year]… We plan to do over 100 cleanups this year as a base goal.”
“We have 7 full-time staff and over 12,000 volunteers during the summer. We started with a goal of collecting 1 million pieces of litter and reached that in 4 years, but In 2022 alone we picked up 1.2 million pieces of litter…We are now collectively at 4.3 million pieces collected and imputed into our database.”
Rochelle Byrne; Executive Director and Founder
Butt Blitz
Cigarettes count for one in five pieces of litter collected by volunteers while on organized shoreline cleanups. Therefore, A Greener Future has collected and documented 3.3 million cigarettes to date. Butt Blitz is a clean-up campaign that prioritizes cigarette litter collection through a focused and action-oriented initiative to remove as many as possible from vulnerable environments.
The campaign's objective is to prevent toxic cigarette butt litter from entering our ecosystems, additionally educating the public of the environmental and habitat impacts caused by cigarettes. Each Spring, groups of volunteers Canada-wide collect cigarette butts from their local communities and send them off to A Greener Futures partner TerraCycle to be recycled.
“[We] started Butt Blitz as we saw in our data that cigarette butt’s were the number one thing picked up…They are full of toxins and plastic [and] People don’t realize the harm they cause. We wanted to pick [cigarette butts] up before they wash into our lakes and rivers…We are raising awareness with our cleanups as much as possible.”
- Rochelle Byrne
“TerraCycle separates all paper and tobacco from the [cigarette] filter and composts them using an industrial composting process. They clean and shred the filter using UV lights to kill bacteria, then turn them into plastic pellets... These pellets are then mixed with stable plastics to make industrial plastic.”
- Rochelle Byrne
Nurdle Hunts
In Collaboration with Non-Profit Firda, A Greener Future took part in their first nurdle hunt during October of 2021. The team conducted various cleanups in locations surroundings Lake Ontario’s shoreline, and volunteers both collected and recorded data associated with gathered nurdles. The process of recording collection data allows A Greener Future to display the information in a way to be used for education purposes. Additionally holding the plastic industry accountable for microplastic spills and environmental impacts. The hunts hope to create more awareness surrounding nurdles while also building more advocacy towards preventing further environmental damage caused by microplastic’s.
Nurdles are manufactured plastic pellets used as a raw material for plastic production. Nurdles are small, lightweight and are often transparent, containing toxic chemicals that can contaminate water and sensitive habitats. Trillions of nurdles are produced yearly, and a devastating 230,000 tonnes make their way into our oceans every year. Nurdle pollution within lake Ontario’s waterways puts residents at risk of drinking microplastic contaminated freshwater.
“We had the perfect opportunity to work with [Fidra] and run this as a program…Every year [Fidra] host’s cleanups and we now connect with them for this.”
“Its fun and engaging…and we get a lot of kids involved.”
“We host these events so communities can learn and take the knowledge forward in their lives and make change.”
-Rochelle Byrne
Shoreline - A Paddle Against Plastic
A Greener Future Documentary Film
Shoreline - A Paddle Against Plastic, is an environmental documentary made to educate and inspire individuals of the issues we face towards the plastic pollution crisis. Shoreline follows A Greener Futures very own executive Director and founder Rochelle Byrne as she paddles an astonishing 430 kilometres across lake Ontario. Rochelle was Motivated to complete her journey in order to seek justice for the consequences plastic pollution has had on Lake Ontario’s shoreline which she has noticed over the years during cleanups.
The film highlights the, ‘intersection between recreation and environmental stewardship’, simply portraying the positive impacts that a single person can make in the direction of environmental sustainability. Rochelle hopes the documentary will facilitate future stewardship and change.
“The reason behind why I did this [documentary] was we had to cancel all of our upcoming cleanups due to the pandemic…We came up with an alternative idea and did this documentary with the goal of raising awareness of the problems of plastics in lake Ontario.”
“I had a lot of fun…One of the biggest take-aways was that I saw the lake from a completely different perspective.”
-Rochelle Byrne
“When doing our cleanup events, we try to make things as waste free as possible, and reuse as much as possible…using litter pickers, reusable gloves, stainless steel buckets and canvas bags. We sort everything and all recyclables go into separate canvas bags. We also sort cigarettes to recycle with TerraCycle.”
-Rochelle Byrne
Collecting and recording all litter data is a very important part of A Greener Future’s mission. The information documented helps outline what litter is most commonly found in Canada’s ecosystems. The data also presents how much litter is collected from each location from year-to-year. This information illustrates the gravity of plastic pollution and cigarette butt issues, therefore educating communities to making change happen. Data collection methodology begins with extensively training volunteers towards handling, sorting and recording all collected litter.
Ontario Trillium Foundation funding provided support towards a data enhancement project in 2018. Granting A Greener Future $31,400 to upgrade their current data program to a more streamlined format. View A Greener Future’s Interactive Map here.
“We’ve collected data right from the beginning…It didn’t take long to find what the problem items were… Our focus [from then on] was waste prevention and education.”
“We are trying to get our data out into the world so students, municipalities and the general public can see what we are finding.”
-Rochelle Byrne