Wayne Fernandes is frustrated he’s hit a “roadblock” with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation (MTO) in trying to get approval to clean up land along a section of Highway 401 near Guelph.

While vacationing in Australia in the spring of 2023, Fernandes said, he noticed how pristine and litter free it was. He said he got “depressed” after returning to Canada and seeing the build-up of litter along the 401 while driving home to Guelph from the Toronto area’s Pearson International Airport.

Fernandes said he wanted to get a better understanding of the scope of the problem, so he used a drone to get an overhead view.

“It’s actually much worse than you think it is because you don’t really see it from the side of the road when you’re in the car,” Fernandes told CBC News.

“There was so much garbage on the 401, including bottles of urine thrown from truck windows.”

After sharing the drone footage online, Fernades said he was contacted by Quebec-based non-profit PurNat, which “lined up a corporate sponsor to do a sponsored event to clean up maybe a kilometre or two” of the side of the highway.

“But we needed the OPP [Ontario Provincial Police] to give us some police protection because you can’t just park on the side of the 401 and clean up,” Fernandes explained.

Founded in 2013, PurNat says it works to protect the environment by setting up and operating cleanup services.

WATCH | Wayne Fernandes’s drone footage of Highway 401 trash between Guelph-Mississauga:

Fernandes said he has sent requests to the MTO’s Adopt-a-Highway program for a permission letter that he could also share with the OPP, but he has not received a response.

“Nobody at the MTO is really helping us in terms of giving us a letter to give to the OPP to give us coverage,” he said.

“An email that we sent [at the] end of summer last year to the MTO got a response in January of this year. So, it took about six months for them to respond,” he said, noting MTO responded with a request for more information.

Fernandes said while “the garbage issue is getting worse,” the MTO appears to be dragging its feet.

“We had 50 people willing to clean this place up, the worst spots of it … but nobody’s getting back to us to give us police protection,” he said.

“We can clean up any small area, but when it comes to the 401, it needs the OPP to be there, and that’s where we had a roadblock and we can’t do anything.”

401 not in Adopt-a-Highway program ‘for safety reasons’

When reached on Wednesday, MTO said it had not received Fernandes’s communication.

However, CBC News has seen copies of emails sent in August and September 2023 to MTO’s Adopt-a-Highway program by Fernandes, PurNat and a staff member in MPP Mike Schreiner’s office, requesting authorization for the cleanup.

Schreiner is the member of provincial parliament for Guelph and leader of the Green Party.

Earlier, a spokesperson for the MTO said the ministry works directly with its maintenance contractors to provide a safe and debris-free highway system, picking up litter along the network throughout the year.

Tanya Blazina said the ministry’s Adopt-a-Highway program is for individuals, groups or communities wishing to help beautify highways through litter pickup and plantings.

But Blazina said the program is limited to sections of specific highways.

“For safety reasons, the majority of Highway 401 is not part of this program,” Blazina wrote in an email.

Group says it needs authorization to help man with cleanup

Lyne Camiré, a spokesperson for PurNat, said the group works with private partners to do cleanups, which can cost up to $20,000 on average.

Fernandes says the amount of litter along the highway is ‘actually much worse than you think it is because you don’t really see it from the side of the road when you’re in the car.’ (Jaison Empson/CBC)

Camiré said the group had found a partner to sponsor the Highway 401 project that Fernandes hoped to undertake.

“It was kind of a good thing … but we didn’t get anywhere because it took time and there was no authorization to do this cleanup,” Camiré said, adding that now, the sponsorship by that partner is no longer available.

Camiré said PurNat “would be very pleased” to partner with Fernandes if he receives authorization to do the cleanup.

“Our mission is to clean everything in nature. It can be a forest, it can be parks, it can be near the water, because there’s some illegal dumping everywhere.”

Fernandes said it’s now too late to do the cleanup this year, but is hoping for “quick responses” from the MTO and authorization letters so “massive cleanups” could be held next summer.

“I want this process to become a well-oiled machine, where any concerned citizen like myself can easily and quickly organize a cleanup, whether they are in Toronto or Thunder Bay,” he said.

“I want to have this whole province cleaned up and instil a sense of civic responsibility in everyone and keep it that way.”