NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory’s photo, licensed as CC BY-SA 2.0

In late September, Lake Muskegon in Michigan was officially removed from the list of polluted water bodies in the Great Lakes Region.

Once home to foundries, paper mills, petroleum storage and sewage treatment plants, the lake and several of its tributaries became an aquatic hellhole of pollution and debris, until a massive cleanup and restoration project saw it return to a state of beauty once again.

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Area of Concern (AOC) list is jointly managed with Canada, and recently lost the honor of hosting Lake Muskegon, which had been on the list for over 40 years.

Decades of work and $84 million of operations saw 190,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment—around 58 Olympic-sized swimming pools—and 110,000 tons of sawmill debris removed from the lakebed.

On October 1st, local community and cleanup leaders joined with government officials on the shore for a celebration.

“This location — which is now home to parks, festivals, cruise ship docks, fishing and recreational enjoyment — was once an industrial scrap yard as recently as the 1980s,” said Muskegon Mayor Ken Johnson. “After decades of collaborative efforts and nearly $100 million invested, we’ve arrived at this momentous occasion.”

When the mayor puts it like that, one can easily see the value in the investment. Time and time again, returning nature to a thriving state proves to be a reward well beyond itself.

Michigan Live, reporting on the story, shared some brilliant figures from a 2020 study that showed how these rewards are manifesting. Already some $27 million has arrived through increased tourism to the lake, which has reached around 400,000 yearly visitors compared to 10 years ago.

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Property values along the lake have gained approximately $7.4 million, not only from the lake’s restoration itself, but the new businesses and activities that the restoration has created.

Muskegon’s suffering began in the 1800s logging boom when boards, dust, and woodchips were routinely dumped into the lake which smothered fish habitat and absorbed large amounts of water-bound oxygen, creating dead zones. Chemical pollution from heavy industry followed, and sewage from the treatment plants caused algal blooms which further degraded the habitat for plant and aquatic life of any sort.

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In 1980, Muskegon was put on the AOC, and local nonprofits began seeking funding for a massive project to reverse the seemingly terminal decline.

$67 million of the funding came from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a bipartisan federal program, while another $14 million came from a mixture of state, local, and private sources.

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