How Beach Cleanup Data Helped Canada Ban Plastic

How To Protect The Ocean · Oct 1, 2026 · 14m · transcript

You rinse the yogurt tub, check the number on the bottom, and drop it in the blue bin. In Canada, only about 9% of plastic waste actually gets recycled, and the global rate is the same. Andrew breaks down why plastic is so hard to recycle, why microplastics are so hard to study, and what the controversy over plastic-in-the-brain headlines does and doesn't tell us.

Then the story moves to a beach in Stanley Park in 1994, where Vancouver Aquarium staff and volunteers started picking up trash and writing down what they found. That cleanup grew into a national program, and its data fed into the…