Participants in the annual Red Cedar River clean-up offer their feedback on the event and the environmental implications for the river.
The surface of the Red Cedar River Sunday morning was flat and still, betraying little of what was underneath.
Shortly after, waders were pulled on, canoes entered the water and grappling hooks were deployed. Ripples spread across the tranquil surface as more than 50 MSU students began to exhume the contents of the river’s murky bottom.
The biannual Red Cedar River Cleanup has been a longstanding tradition from the Fisheries and Wildlife Club, club president Kirsten Johnson said.
She believes conditions in the river have improved on the whole, but on Sunday, there was no shortage of items to haul from the water.
A chair, parking meter, fire extinguisher, toaster and a desk from Wells Hall were all found among more than an estimated 3,000 pounds of debris pulled from the river.
More than 50 bikes also were pulled from the river in less than four hours Sunday. Some were covered in sludge and slime from months of submersion, but others still held the polished sheen of a recently discarded ride.
An entire bike rack was found in the shadow of the Wells Hall bridge.
Many students chalked up the constant plethora of bikes found in the Red Cedar River to drunken hooliganism, and a passing MSU police officer speculated the river might act as a convenient place to ditch a stolen bicycle.
The club’s research chair, fisheries and wildlife senior Alex Cuda, said contrary to many assumptions, the river is actually quite clean, despite the amount of debris dumped into it.
“It makes me a little disappointed that people really don’t care or understand the impact that they’re making,” Cuda said. “But at the same time, it makes me feel good that I’m here, because that garbage is going to collect, so somebody has to clean it up.”
Fisheries and wildlife senior Danielle Boston organized the cleanup and said much of the event’s work is to inform students about the river.
“It’s important to get the word out that the river is clean, and all the pollution going into it is just going to degrade the quality,” Boston said. ”The river depends upon other people as well, it’s not just a natural resource. Anything that we throw in is not just going to affect the water, it’s going to affect the community around it.”
After bikes are removed from the river, they are taken to MSU’s Surplus and Recycling Center. Operations manager Bob Bryan said 99 percent of the bikes end up as scrap metal, but occasionally a bike can be refurbished to be sold at the Surplus Store.
“Basically the idea is to try to make it a zero-waste event,” Bryan said. “We decided it didn’t make much sense to throw in the river, take it out of the river, then throw it right in a landfill.”
He said students’ actions don’t reflect the more sustainable direction the university is trying to move in, and the amount of waste hasn’t seemed to decrease.
“It’s kind of embarrassing when you see what some of the students throw in there,” Bryan said. “It seems like in this day and age, we would know better.”
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