119,000 pieces of litter picked up along the shores of Lake Ontario

We’re celebrating our most successful Love Your Lake campaign to date

Photo courtesy of Love Your Lake volunteer, Victoria DeBoer

What is Love Your Lakes?

We used to answer this question with a familiar spiel that went something like this: “Love Your Lakes is a series of 100 community litter cleanups along the shores of Lake Ontario, between Kingston and Niagara-on-the-Lake.”

However, as we all know, the pandemic changed everything - including, of course, how we run our programs.

In 2021, we adapted our Love Your Lakes program into a Community Science model, where, instead of hosting big, public gatherings, we recruited volunteers to do their own, independent cleanups of the shoreline.

Volunteers were trained on how to safely do a cleanup and collect data. Then, we challenged them to collectively pick up 100,000 pieces of litter between May 15th and June 30th and sent them on their way.

A Greener Future staff, Elise and Nicole, and Love Your Lakes volunteer, Karen.

The Results

We were blown away by the success of Love Your Lakes 2021, and we owe it all to the 81 amazing volunteers who participated in the program. With their help, we were able to remove 119,112 pieces of litter from the Lake Ontario shoreline, blowing our initial goal of picking up 100,000 pieces out of the water!

With this new Community Science model, we were also able to reach more locations than we would have otherwise. In total, 266 cleanups were done across 112 shoreline locations.

Top 10 items:

  1. Polystyrene (Foam): 38,212 pieces

  2. Cigarette Butts: 23,656 pieces

  3. Misc. Plastic: 16,752 pieces

  4. Paper: 6,744 pieces

  5. Food Wrappers: 6,245 pieces

  6. Plastic Bottle Caps: 3,004 pieces

  7. Glass: 2,832 pieces

  8. Construction Items: 1,942 pieces

  9. Misc. Plastic Bags: 1,721 pieces

  10. Cans: 1,557 pieces


Results Dashboard


2021 Cleanup Locations


Thank you

We are so thankful to our sponsors, volunteers, and supporters for helping us make Love Your Lakes 2021 our most successful one yet! With your continued support, we are able to ensure that Lake Ontario remains a clean and safe water source for us to enjoy


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