Kare Shinn has chaired and participated in numerous Toronto-based environmental committees, organizations and environmental assessment steering committees, most notably in 1992-95 when she initiated Toronto’s first Water Efficiency Plan, recovering built infrastructure capacity worth $250 million by preventing unnecessary expansion of the landmark Harris Filtration Plant in the Beach neighbourhood. As founding Co-Chair of the Public Committee for Safe Sewage Treatment in Metropolitan Toronto, she participated in the Full Environmental Assessment of the Ashridges Bay Sewage Plant from 1991 to 2011, working alongside Julia Langer of the World Wildlife Fund, Metro Toronto Works Committee engineers and the Department of Health to put in place a stringent Sewer Use By-Law that removed over 80% of the mercury, other heavy metals and gender altering chemicals, from entering the water supply in Lake Ontario.