'We used to need dump trucks:' Volunteers scour Grand, Red Cedar rivers in annual cleanup

LANSING — About 200 people put on gloves and raincoats Saturday morning to remove trash and debris from the Grand and Red Cedar rivers along the 10.2 mile Lansing River Trail.

The effort was the 30th Lansing Board of Water and Light and Impression 5 Science Center's 30th Adopt A River event.

"If stuff gets in the river, it can hurt the creatures," Arkeith Branson said. The eight-year-old was attending the event with his grandmother, Kim Wheeler.

"We wanted to get out here to participate in the community events, help clean up the river," Wheeler said. She and several other people who work at University of Michigan Health-Sparrow came to the event together.

After three decades of the event, Lansing Board of Water & Light CEO Dick Peffley said he's proud of the progress the volunteers have made.

"We used to need dump trucks for all the debris we'd pull out, now we usually just need a few pickup trucks," he said. "We've started magnet fishing to see what we can pull out because we've cleaned up most everything you can see."

About 45 members of the Michigan State University women's rowing team attended the event.

"We practice on the river," junior Haley Reinhart said. "So we think it's important to come out here and clean it up so we have a nice place to practice."

Some of the volunteers said that they were there because they were concerned about the environment and wanted to make sure the river was clean for the plant and animal life around it.

"We saw trash and things that can really hurt the animals," Dusty Prater said. "We wanted to be able to give a little back to the Earth, that's why we're here."

Prater is a member of UAW Local 602, and attended the event with other members of the union and their families.

Serena Kyser, 13, the granddaughter of one of the union members, said she felt like she needed to clean up the river because of how little other people cared.

"People don't care about the Earth anymore," she said. "They don't know how to treat it."

Volunteers could also choose between five different types of trees to plant at home.

The trees, at no cost to the volunteers, are part of BWL's ongoing Plant a Tree in the Right Place program, which tries to spread awareness of the importance of planting trees while making sure they're not in the way of power lines, said Vice Chair of BWL's Board of Commissioners David Price.

Peffley sees at least 30 more years of the event, and said that planning for next year's starts Sunday.

"The time to do this is less than it used to be," he said. "We take less and less of volunteers' Saturdays... Maybe we start covering more of the river."

Contact Sarah Atwood at satwood@lsj.com, or follow her on X @sarahmatwood.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Volunteers scour Grand, Red Cedar rivers in annual BWL Adopt a River cleanup