What lies beneath

Pincers clicked open and shut impatiently in the hands of Mark Dalgarno '07 as he stepped gingerly through a curtain of wild rose bushes and poison ivy on the overgrown shore of Lake Carnegie.

Nested in the plants was an empty Gatorade bottle, which the pincers delivered into Dalgarno's trash bag, where it joined beer cans, fast food packaging and condom wrappers.

Dalgarno's collection was a small part of Sunday's effort to clean up the litter in and around Lake Carnegie and the nearby Delaware & Raritan Canal. The project was sponsored by the New Jersey Water Watch organization as part of the USG-sponsored Princeton in the Nation's Service (PINS) initiative.

About a dozen students pitched in for the event. Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) was scheduled to attend but did not show up.

Alexis Gelperin, the Princeton Campus Coordinator for New Jersey Water Watch and a visiting lecturer in the molecular biology department, painted a grim picture of the local bodies of water. Recent testing reveals only the hardiest of macro-invertebrates surviving in Lake Carnegie, she said.

"Public awareness is the most important thing" to curb this problem, Gelperin said. "We've done a lot to regulate the [water-polluting] industries, and now it's up to individual people."

Such public awareness is lacking in Princeton, Gelperin said. She cited a government statistic that 80 percent of New Jersey's waterways are unsafe for swimming or fishing, the highest in the nation by a wide margin.

"People don't think there's trash in Princeton," Gelperin said. "My friends were joking, 'Are you going to plant trash?' "

On the nearby D&R canal, other students picked up litter in the water from canoes.

"I have to imagine that the chemical content is about the same [as Lake Carnegie], and our drinking water comes from there," Gelperin said.

Steve Androsko, who owns a canoe and kayak rental business on the banks of the D&R canal, said the water in the canal was relatively clean. "There's trash in it, but I assume it's not that toxic," he said.

Chika Anekwe '06, Joyce Lee '09 and Alex Lenahan '07 manned a canoe together and returned with bottles, styrofoam food containers and a propeller.

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Lenahan, a USG senator who has participated in cleanups of the canal in a different area, said it seemed cleaner than the last time, when he found tires and a television. But, he added, it was possible that the recent heavy rain washed much of the refuse downstream.

Richard Hankinson, a Harrison Street resident, biked over to the cleanup site after seeing a poster advertising it at Small World Coffee. The clean up is "sorely needed," he said.

"It's not that hard: Get a bag, walk down the road, and pick up stuff."