The city of Cleveland sits on the banks of Lake Erie at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. In the 1960s, the Cuyahoga was so polluted with petroleum waste it actually caught fire! Randy Newman wrote a song about it for the movie Major League. Humans have some genetic defect that makes them believe they can dump all kinds of waste products into America’s rivers, lakes, and oceans and there will be no consequences. The Supine Court tends to agree, having ruled on several occasions that regulating pollution of US waterways at the source is an example of government overreach that must be resisted with every fiber of our being. That suggests the supposedly smart people on the court are devoid of common sense and have no concept of how the natural world works. Think about that for a minute. Today, about 5.5 billion gallons of freshwater are drawn from the lake each day to meet industrial and consumer needs. While water quality on Lake Erie today has improved since the days of it being used as a large-scale industrial dumping ground for steel mills and chemical plants, it still struggles with poor water quality. The 2025 State of the Great Lakes report released last month found that Lake Erie still ranks poorly for pollution caused by chemical runoff and is by far the biggest body of water to consistently rank in the top five of America’s most-polluted lakes. Demand has grown partly because cites like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo growing for the first time in more than 50 years, and partly because so many data centers that need water for cooling are being built in the region. In response, organizations in and around Cleveland and neighboring communities have agreed to create a platform to test technologies that measure and monitor water quality. Hundreds of sensor buoys will observe and detect E coli, algal blooms, turbidity levels, and more than a dozen other water-related factors in collaboration with companies and researchers from around the world. “Several years ago, our civic leaders were asking: ‘Why aren’t we doing more with water? It’s our biggest natural asset.’ We figured our biggest issue around water was [the lack of] water tech,” Bryan Stubbs of the Cleveland Water Alliance, told The Guardian. “This idea of test bedding became kind of the secret ingredient of what we’ve done here.” The effort will turn the lake into the largest digitally connected freshwater body of water in the world. The buoys give researchers real-time information on wave height and contaminant and pollution levels across 7,750 square miles both off-shore and on land. Microplastics Abatement At Case Western Reserve University, researchers have begun using new technologies to capture 90% of microplastics down to 50 microns from washing machines, preventing them from being dumped into Lake Erie, which is particularly vulnerable to pollution because of its shallow depth and tendency to warm quickly in spring and summer. Other projects are recording solar radiation, dissolved oxygen levels, and water and air temperatures. Korean companies have come to the area to test electrochemical water treatment methods in Lake Erie’s water. “Lake Erie is 2 percent of the Great Lakes’ water but 50 percent of its diversity … because it’s the shallowest,” says Stubbs. “And it’s warming quicker each year.” That warming is made worse by the more than 12 million residents and businesses — from farming and manufacturing to residential communities — in its watershed. Waste from all three sources regularly ends up in the lake. The western section of the lake is especially affected by runoff from agricultural in the form of phosphates that enter from the Maumee River. The challenges to cleaning up the lake are extensive. “Scientists and others say we need a 40 percent phosphorus reduction to minimize the blooms. About 90 percent coming into the western Lake Erie basin is from agricultural runoff,” said Sandy Bihn of the Lake Erie Waterkeeper, who is based in Toledo, Ohio. Agricultural Runoff Credit: 2025 State of the Great Lakes report While efforts to reduce the amount of commercial fertilizer have succeeded in reducing the amount of phosphorus going into Lake Erie, the amount of manure has grown in large part due to the increasing number of livestock operations in the area. “We’re not getting anywhere. The manure problem is the core problem, the growing problem,” Bihn said. The question that begs to be asked is why pig shit is allowed to be dumped into area waterways, but the Supine Court thinks doing so should be perfectly legal because, you know — government overreach! Privatizing Profits, Socializing Costs Farming isn’t the only industry responsible for Lake Erie’s pollution issues. Last year, Campbell’s, the soup company, admitted to polluting the Maumee River more than 5,400 times from a local plant between 2019 and 2024. In nearby Toledo, city authorities have had to spend about $500 million on water treatment upgrades after severe algae blooms in 2014 made the region’s lake water poisonous and forced hundreds of thousands of residents to go without water for three days. With the prevailing wind coming from the west, harmful algae blooms can be pushed east into other heavily populated areas such as metro Cleveland. Sharp-eyed readers will note that taxpayers pay to clean up industrial messes because heaven forefend that businesses should do so! In Avon Lake, a coastal town of about 27,000 people 20 miles west of Cleveland, administrators and the Cleveland Water Alliance have teamed up with a company in Korea to develop a system for making commercial-grade sodium hypochlorite, the active ingredient in chlorine bleach, on site. The pilot project is the first of its kind in North America and eliminates the need to ship hazardous chlorine gas on trucks and trains from across the region. “We were looking at getting away from chlorine gas for disinfection, and we looked at on-site generation,” says Rob Munro of the Avon Lake Regional Water, a utility with about a quarter of a million customers across northern Ohio. “The big thing for us is the safety standpoint, and there are supply chain problems [that are eliminated].” The next challenge for Stubbs and others at the Alliance is to promote technologies for wintertime monitoring of aquatic life activity and behavioral changes as well as levels of water turbidity. Higher levels of cloudiness in lake water can promote the buildup of ice, which can block water intake pipes on the lake during the coldest times of the year. “The more buoys we have out there,” says Stubbs, “the more data we can make available to let operators know what’s happening given wind conditions [and] currents.”
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