Will Municipal Green Infrastructure Save Lake Erie?

Keeping Lake Erie clean from green has as much to do with water quality as it does with aesthetics. The longtime Great Lakes problem child and bellwether to the nation’s freshwater supply suffers from being the shallowest of the waterways and most susceptible to phosphorus loading and subsequent algae blooms.Once hailed as a success story for its cleanup efforts, the lake again turned green in 2011, with a 2,000-square-mile mat of toxic algae stretching from Detroit to Cleveland. Although discharge limits on wastewater treatment plants proved successful a decade ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and surrounding watersheds face a