Volunteers clean up garbage along the Red Cedar River in East Lansing. Credit: Michigan State University

By LILY COLE

Capital News Service

LANSING – Plastic bags, bottles, cans, fishing debris and even human excrement are just some of the waste found on or in lakes and streams during ice fishing season.

Still, grassroots campaigns are changing how that debris is managed.

Mike Stout, the founder and president of Michigan Waterway Stewards, makes it a priority to keep these places clean of debris.

After kayaking in rivers in Michigan, he said was shocked by their conditions.

“I was appalled,” Stout said. “I’ve never seen waterways anywhere remotely close to so littered and polluted.”

Since starting the organization about four years ago, 208,000 pounds of trash have been removed and more than 150 river-wide obstructions have been cleared.

From the Red Cedar River on Michigan State University’s campus alone, Michigan Waterway Stewards have pulled a couple of hundred bicycles and about 300 electric scooters from the river.

“As far as we know, that’s the single greatest incident of tossed electric scooters in a river,” Stout said.

The organization focuses on community collaboration and volunteer work through education campaigns, environmental projects and partnerships with universities.

While Stout said Michigan Waterway Stewards doesn’t usually do winter cleanups, it has fall cleanups so debris doesn’t get into rivers and streams during the colder season.

“We come at the end of the year to make sure we clean up all that litter and trash so it doesn’t get blown into the water through the heavy winds and the snow melt,” Stout said.

“So much of that trash, if we don’t pick it up, does make its way into the river or lake or stream because everything eventually makes its way to our waterways.”

Stout launched a community program to address the problem.

For David Smith, a retired teacher from Wayne-Westland public schools, ice fishing in the early 1960s and beyond revealed a plethora of debris, mainly plastic bottles and cans.

“There were beer bottles and cans, but that was back before the [10 cent deposit] bottle bill passed in Michigan,” Smith said. “What existed before was just pathetic in terms of the amount of litter you would see everywhere.”

Before he stopped fishing about five to six years ago, Smith and his fishing partners sometimes threw away garbage that wasn’t theirs.

He also said some lakes and streams were unfishable because of the amount of debris and even chemicals in the water.

While Smith said he believes there’s less debris in waterways since he began angling, it’s still important to educate people, especially youth, about the impact of garbage on these ecosystems.

“Plastic stuff you throw in the water doesn’t go away, and fishing line creates a heck of a problem for waterfowl and fish,” Smith said.

A similarly motivated campaign in Minnesota called Keep It Clean addresses the growing problem of garbage left on the ice by anglers, campers and recreationists through education, legislation and enforcement.

That effort began about 13 years ago after Joe Henry, one of the founders and the executive director of Lake of the Woods Tourism, and volunteers from the nonprofit Friends of Zippel Bay State Park, found large amounts of garbage during a beach cleanup.

“It just so happened that the wind was blown in the right way, and they got five trailer loads full of garbage,” Henry said. “Everything from planks, wood, plastic, styrofoam, fishing, powders, a whole bunch of stuff. So they were like, ‘this is crazy, we gotta do something.'”

In 2023, the campaign achieved a major win when Minnesota enacted a law prohibiting leaving waste on frozen lakes or allowing it to come into contact with the ice. The rule is enforceable with a $100 fine.

Keep It Clean’s outreach methods include billboards, a social media presence, community events where Henry and other advocates speak about the campaign and geo-fencing digital ads that send reminders to anglers’ phones when they drive out onto the lake.

For both campaigns, Keep It Clean and Michigan Waterway Stewards, creating a culture of care is their mission.

Henry emphasized that caring for the environment should bring people together regardless of political differences.

He and Smith both said that – even if they wouldn’t call themselves “treehuggers” – everyone shares a responsibility to keep the outdoors clean for hunters, anglers and other people.