1000 tons of plastic and one less weight on the shoulders

Record temperatures, forest fires, floods: environmental ills give many reasons to worry. “The best remedy for eco-anxiety is to take action,” says Jimmy Vigneux, co-founder of Mission 1000 Tonnes, which relies on citizen mobilization to clean up the edges of waterways.

The heat wave that hit Montreal at the end of July was in full swing when Jimmy Vigneux was found near Verdun’s urban beach. “We often forget that we have access to the river in Montreal,” he observes. “Here in Verdun, people swim in it.”

It’s not crowded on this Tuesday afternoon, but a few dozen people are enjoying the sun, sand and water. Families with young children, mostly. There’s a holiday scent here that’s more intoxicating than in any other park in the city.

This place has symbolic value in the eyes of Jimmy Vigneux. This is where the Saint-Laurent Expedition will leave from this Friday – we’ll come back to that. This is also where the 10-ton Mission (the objective has since been multiplied by 100) conducted its first citizen waste collection operation. “The people of Verdun are really mobilizing,” he emphasizes, citing Propre@Verdun, a group of citizens who clean public spaces.

As if to prove him right, Jimmy Vigneux was stopped two minutes later by a passerby who recognized his t-shirt. François Dandurand knows about the 1000 Ton Mission, but has never participated in a collective collection in his area. “I wasn’t around when it was happening,” he explains.

He still picks up trash everywhere he goes. Alone. For 20 years. The idea came to him after seeing another citizen do it. “I thought he looked a little crazy,” he admits. “I thought it was up to the city employees to do that.” Then, after thinking about it, he said to himself that we couldn’t expect a blue-collar worker on every street corner to pick up everything that citizens “throw without looking.” So, he took action.

The momentum of get involved

Jimmy Vigneux, who is also the head of Stratégies Saint-Laurent, a consultation body aimed in particular at protecting the river, was not destined for environmental action. However, he acknowledges that he has a deep-rooted activist background. “I always wanted to get involved socially, to create change for causes that I find just,” he says.

Before launching what became Mission 1000 Tonnes, Jimmy Vigneux was already trying to raise awareness. “I would share bad environmental news on social media, thinking: this will wake the world up,” he recalls. Until he realized it was doing the opposite.

Bad news makes you want to withdraw into yourself and fuels eco-anxiety, he found. So when he and marine biologist Lyne Morissette launched their community-based riverbank cleanup project, it was crucial that the message be positive and stay that way.

“We never say, ‘Look how disgusting it was,’” he says of the cleanup operations. “We say, ‘There were 50 of us, there were 100 of us, it was fun to do this together to change things.’ That’s motivating. We have to create a positive movement. People move away from catastrophic movements, it’s depressing.”

Taking action has another benefit, he says: realizing that you’re not alone. Lyne Morissette and Jimmy Vigneux’s idea snowballed, in fact. Communities from all regions of Quebec mobilized, carrying out thousands of community cleanups that have collected 404 tons of waste to date.

A global effect

There is still trash to be collected everywhere in the Montreal area, especially single-use plastics, but Jimmy Vigneux sees the difference between 2018 and now. “We don’t find many tires, pieces of refrigerator or metal, big pieces like that anymore, because we’ve been collecting them for seven years,” he says.

The 1000-Tonne Mission has also gained in scope. It now has “ambassadors” as far away as France, Denmark and Togo, who are mobilizing their communities to collect waste. Its ambitions are also greater: on Friday, it will begin an operation called the Saint-Laurent Expedition, which will leave Verdun for Anticosti, with stops in about ten municipalities along the way.

In addition to organizing shoreline and seabed cleanups (divers will be involved) along the way, the team will take sediment samples to characterize the microplastics found there. Knowing what types of microplastics are found on the shoreline could help target cleanup efforts more effectively, Vigneux explains.

What makes the 1000 Ton Mission so successful, according to Jimmy Vigneux, is that it is based on an action that everyone can do – bending down to pick up a piece of trash – and that protecting the environment concerns everyone. “We can cure all the diseases on Earth, but if the planet dies, it’s no use.”

59%

A majority of Quebecers from generations Y (millennials) and Z believe that the environment will deteriorate in 2024. (Source: Youth study, Léger, summer 2023)

Visit the 1000 Ton Mission website

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