Operation Litter Ridder arming concerned Vaughan citizens with tools to fight trash

Yorkregion.com
Nov. 7, 2022

Kathryn Leinster was shocked by the amount of trash she’s seen near the Humber River.

As she and her daughter used to go on walks, she kept seeing different kinds of trash piling up -- from plastic water bottles, cigarette butts, and even an open box of condoms strewn across a park, as she’s keen to demonstrate on her phone.

She’s had enough.

“We started picking it up. It took us a week. We took a couple of garbage bags every day, and it took us a week to basically just clean up our walk that we could see,” said Leinster.

More shockingly, litter had been so pervasive in the parks that overgrowth had covered plastic from years ago. The crinkling sound of plastic beneath her feet rankled her.

Leinster has decided to put her business acumen behind her environmental concerns. She once operated a wholesale bakery that dealt with manufacturing, retail, and wholesale, so she understands the supply chain and how to how to efficiently run a business.

Leinster has started a social enterprise called Operation Litter Ridder, a business where she sells a simple solution to unsightly garbage -- a brightly coloured knapsack people can strap on that fits up to seven pounds of garbage. Made from 85 per cent recyclable material, the knapsack is Leinster’s answer to the troubling litter.

Since starting the company, Leinster has found one pervasive pest: plastic.

Most plastic comes from packaging. And that packaging is often tied back to the fossil fuel industry, with the conversion of petroleum or natural gas -- a highly energy-intensive process.

It is estimated this conversion accounted for 400 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2012, according to a 2018 OECD report. But processing residual waste helps lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduces the amount of waste going to a landfill.

In 2021, York Region achieved 92 per cent diversion from landfill, exceeding the goal of 90 per cent, according to the region’s 2021 annual waste management report.

So, there is hope that, as time goes on, both the city and the region will reduce its dependability on plastic.

“Everybody ingests a credit card worth of plastics every week,” said Leinster, referring to a 2019 study showing the average person ingested five grams of plastic every week. “And that was kind of shocking to me, you know? I mean, that's ridiculous. So, time to do something.”