Meet the Zamboni-like robot cleaning Ontario beaches

When you’re at the beach this summer, you might notice something pretty cool: a Zamboni-like robot that meticulously cleans the sand.

It’s called a BeBot, and it was unveiled for the first time in Canada last year by the not-for-profit group Pollution Probe.

The vacuum-like device — which can cover 3,000 square meters per hour — sifts through sand in search of small pieces of waste. Last summer, while deployed to shorelines on all five Great Lakes, the BeBot collected a whopping 43,375 pieces of debris, including cigarette butts, toys, fireworks pieces, and fishing and hunting gear.

The machine is back in business this summer. It just finished a deployment near Lake Simcoe, and is now at Port Burwell Provincial Park near Lake Erie.

On this week’s episode of Village Media’s Closer Look podcast, we revisit our chat with Melissa De Young, the CEO of Pollution Probe, who told us how the robot works, why it’s so important — and how beach-goers react when they spot it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Modeling has shown that about 10 million kilograms of plastic are entering our Great Lakes every year, and that the concentrations of microplastics are on par with what we find in the oceans.

SPEAKER_03 0:36

Welcome back to Closer Look. I'm Scott Sexmith Frisco, just knee deep on some other assignments this week, and unfortunately not able to join us today. It's summertime, and if you happen to be at the beach, you might notice something pretty cool: a Zamboni-like robot that actually cleans the shoreline. It's called a B-bot. And it was unveiled for the first time in Canada last year by the not-for-profit group Pollution Probe. The vacuum-like device, which by the way can cover 3,000 square meters per hour, sifts through sand in search of small pieces of waste. Last summer, while deployed to shorelines on all five of the Great Lakes, the Bebot collected an astounding forty-three thousand three hundred and seventy-five pieces of debris. Now that includes cigarette butts, toys, fireworks, pieces, and fishing and hunting gear. The Bebot is back in business this summer. In fact, it just finished a deployment near Lake Simcoe and is now at Port Burwell Provincial Park on the shore of Lake Erie. On this week's episode of Closer Look, we're going to revisit a really informative conversation we had last summer with Melissa De Young, the CEO of Pollution Probe, who told us how the robot works, why it's important, and how beachgoers react when they spot it. Here now is that conversation. Very pleased to have on the program with us Melissa De Young. She is the CEO of Pollution Probe. Melissa, welcome to the program. What an exciting week. Canada's first ever beach cleaning robot has launched. Tell us about it.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Yeah, well, thanks so much for the opportunity to talk about it today. This is something we've been working on for quite a few months now. And uh, you know, there was no roadmap for how to bring the first beach cleaning robot to Canada. So um we were figuring it all out, but we're very excited to say that it's now uh in use. It's an electric beach cleaning robot which uh is designed to sift the sand and to remove plastic and other debris um without harming the environment. And it's really effective in public spaces. Um we were piloting it initially at Sibald Point Provincial Park, but we will be moving it around this summer. Um so yeah, we're very excited to finally have this underway.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

I've read a lot about how it's been compared to the Zamboni for the beach. Do you like that term or is that inaccurate?

SPEAKER_01 3:02

I think visually it does look a lot like a Zamboni for the beach. Uh slightly different function, but uh but certainly does look like that. It actually has some military-grade technology included in it as well.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

So it's bulletproof, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Yeah. Well, the furniture does look a lot like a tank, actually. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Yeah. So you you guys didn't design this. Did you get this from somewhere else, or has it been out? Has it been around for a while?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Yes. We um we procured it from a company out of France called Poor Lu. And we have through our Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup Initiative, which is a binational initiative that my organization, Pollution Probe, uh, co-leads with the Council of the Great Lakes region. Um, our partners, the Council of the Great Lakes region and some of their partners in the US have been piloting them for a couple of years now. Uh, so that technology has been in use, and we've been able to see how effective it is and um sort of pushed us to keep up the good fight to get one into Canada.

SPEAKER_03 3:57

Melissa, let's talk uh dollars and cents. Uh, how much?

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Oh goodness. I don't have to figure off the top of my head, but it is quite expensive. Um, it doesn't look cheap. No, it's not. It's not. But um, but again, it's it's not only effective at removing plastic from the environment, it's an amazing public engagement tool. We're collecting data on everything that we find. So it has um, you know, if you look at how much it costs to do cleanup in general, we're working on trying to do the preventative side alongside the cleanup effort so that we can avoid further costs down the road.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

Let's talk some of those specifics. How does it, how much can it pick up, say, in an eight-hour span? And what kind of stuff have you picked up? What do you what have you found so far?

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Well, we've only been piloting it for a very short time in Canada, so we're still learning what that looks like here. Um, we do know from what we've seen on the US side that uh we're thinking this is really going to change our data profile. Um, our initiative's been running for about this is our sixth season. We started it in 2020. Most of the technologies we use on the Canadian side are located in the water. So we tend to find a lot of very small pieces of plastic that are known as microplastics that have broken down from larger pieces over time. We know that with the Bebot, the beach cleaning robot, we're capturing a lot more of the macro plastics, the large pieces of plastic before they actually enter the water. So we do know that we're gonna have a shift in our data profile and what we're seeing coming off the beach versus what we find in the water. Uh the B bot itself has a sieving capacity of about 100 liters per cycle. So um that's about the equivalent to around 14 basketballs worth of debris. Uh, it can clean up to 3,000 meters squared per hour. Um, we won't be collecting that much. Uh, we tend to move very slowly because we are, you know, sorting and characterizing what we find, but it can cover quite a large span of the beach in a very short period of time.

SPEAKER_03 5:58

Now, Melissa, it's not every day that you go to the beach and see what some might call a Zamboni uh on the beach sifting through the sand. But uh some of the reaction uh from people uh who have seen it, what are they saying about it?

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Well, they're very excited. I think um, you know, as I said earlier, one of the most important parts of this project for us is having that public engagement piece. And um, you know, having a discussion about plastic and microplastic in the water is one thing, but actually seeing this uh in person, doing what it's meant to be doing is a whole other thing entirely. And um part of our effort is to bring the community in to have people see what plastic pollution looks like firsthand because it is quite different than litter on the street. Um, and once that connection's made, people tend to be very invested in um being a part of the solution and what they can do to make sure that they're not contributing to plastic um out in the environment. So we get a lot of questions about what it is, what it's doing. And the number one question we get asked is what we're finding. So that is those conversations um start from.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

It's definitely a talker. That's what happened to us when we saw it this morning. We just started talking about it, had a whole bunch of, which is which is great. So if you stumble across it, I can see why people ask a lot of questions. You've looked at this idea that this is one small part of the Great Lakes plastic cleanup that's been going on for a few years. A, can you tell us what that is? What why and but also this is an obvious dumb question, but why is that so important? Why is the the issue of plastics in the Great Lakes is a major issue, it's a major problem. Why it's so important?

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Sure. Well, the Great Lakes, we know, are one of the largest freshwater systems in the world. Um, they have enormous uh, you know, ties to cultural and economic aspects. So they're very important, not only to the region, but to the world. Um, and you know, back I would say 2018-ish, we started to have a lot of discussions around the fact that um, you know, there's increasing attention being played to ocean plastics and the huge issue that we have with plastic in our oceans. But we knew that freshwater was an equal part of that conversation. Whatever's happening in our freshwater um ultimately finds its way out to the ocean where it contributes to those broader impacts. Um, modeling has shown that about 10 million kilograms of plastic are entering our Great Lakes every year and that the concentrations of microplastics are on par with what we find in the ocean. So we knew this was a big issue. It's obviously a complex issue. There are multiple sources and pathways for plastic. So we were really looking at what we can do to help contribute not only to, again, removing plastic, but contribute to an understanding of what's actually happening in our lakes because there was not a lot of data at that time. So our Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup really came about out of those discussions. Um, and we we wanted to make use of technology. So our initiative has now over 160 technologies installed across the Binational Great Lakes region at over 225 sites. We started out our first year with about 21 sites, and we've grown um, you know, exponentially from there. Uh so we make use of the technology, as I said, to remove the plastic or to prevent it from entering the lakes. But the other key pieces of our program are that we are collecting data on everything that we find, and we sort and characterize those different types of plastic, and that gives us a sense of not only what we're finding in different lakes across each of the five great lakes, but also what are the potential sources. Um, and we we bring the community into that. We have volunteers come out and help us do that sorting and characterizing. And all of this information is publicly available, but it's also used for important policy development. Our program has contributed to policy development already and discussions with industry and trying to figure out some of those longer-term solutions.

SPEAKER_02 9:57

That's a great idea. You kind of answered the question I was going to ask, but why this data is so important. When you when you're able to collect that kind of specific data, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah, well, it's it's um it's the first step, I think, in in coming up with any type of solution. You really have to understand what it is you're dealing with. So um there aren't any sort of long-term established monitoring programs in the Great Lakes, and we use community science to provide information uh with the lack of that scientific monitoring program. So um communities can come in, and again, this gives us a really good sense of how much we're finding in different areas. We know, for example, that um, you know, urban areas we find way more plastic than in rural areas. We have different uh breakdowns of the types of plastic we collect in different lakes. So um there's a lot more that needs to be done in terms of understanding plastic pollution because it is so complicated and complex and it's found everywhere, um, all throughout the water column, all throughout the region. So this is certainly not the only effort that's required, but we are working very hard to play a part in informing those discussions and making sure that the solutions that we do develop are actually based in what we're finding actually out in the environment.

SPEAKER_03 11:12

Not sure if you've uh finalized uh a summer schedule yet, uh Melissa, but uh where could one uh look for and find the B bot?

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Well, it's going to be piloted at a number of different provincial parks this summer. It's starting out uh, as we talked about at Sibald Point Provincial Park. It will then move to Inver Huron Provincial Park on Lake Huron. Uh that will be in July. Um, following that, we're going to have it move to Long Point Provincial Park on Lake Erie. And from there, it will move to Lake Ontario and Sand Banks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County. And then it will wrap up at the end of the season in about uh September at some point. It will be at Darlington Provincial Park, also on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Well, that's a busy summer. Are you able to track how many kilometers this thing will drive over the beach?

SPEAKER_01 12:02

We do plan to do that. Yeah, we're hoping to have sort of a map drawn out and um have dates for when it's moving. Uh, we have a great trailer, so people might spot it on the highway. It's got uh branding for the robot on it.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

Great. Does it have a Twitter feed or anything?

SPEAKER_01 12:16

It's a good plan. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

You gotta get it, you gotta get on Instagram. That's what I'm told. In a dream world, how many of these would you have in 10 years?

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Oh, goodness, that's an excellent question. Um, I think we want to make sure because it's a mobile technology, it can actually move quite far, but we would love to make sure that it's um covering as much distance as it can because we know how effective it is at removing plastic. Um, and we know that the Great Lakes aren't the only place that is, you know, uh having an issue with plastic pollution. All of our freshwater systems are. So I think a fleet of them would be fantastic and they could work uh to complement each other and we could make a much more significant impact.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Can I ask you a question? It's a little off topic, Melissa. Obviously, the the protection of the Great Lakes has been something for a long time that's been done on both sides of the border in tandem, working together. Have you found in the last few months with the ongoing trade war that that's impacted any of the efforts in working together with the Americans on protecting our Great Lakes?

SPEAKER_01 13:10

I don't I don't think that anyone um is ever going to think that our Great Lakes shouldn't be protected. So I think efforts are definitely ongoing. Um we take part in a number of binational initiatives that um have sort of doubled down on commitment to ensure that this isn't an issue um in the midst of everything else that's going on in the world. So um I think it's in discussion, but I don't see anything changing in terms of everyone's commitment to ensuring that we protect our Great Lakes.

SPEAKER_03 13:40

All right, there's Melissa De Young, CEO of uh Pollution Probe. Uh thanks for this, uh Melissa, and congrats on the launch uh of the Bebot.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Thank you so much for uh having me. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 13:53

Our thanks again to Melissa DeYoung from Pollution Probe for her time and a great conversation about the Bebot. That's our show for this week. As always, we appreciate your time each and every week. Be sure to follow us on our social channels, subscribe and watch back episodes at closerlookpodcast.ca, and of course you can reach out anytime at closerlook at villagemedia.ca. Today's show, as always, produced by Zach Tronzo. And for everyone who makes Closer Look possible each and every week, thanks for watching. I'm Scott Sexmith. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. We'll see you next time, right here on Closer Look.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Briscoe and Scott's wardrobe, provided in part by Morris Clothing for Men.