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There was a time in the 1960s that the lakes and rivers around Cleveland were so polluted with petrochemicals and other contaminants that they frequently caught on fire.

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.

All the while, upwards of 5.5bn gallons of freshwater are drawn from the lake each day – enough to fill 8,333 Olympic-size swimming pools – to meet industrial and consumer needs.

At a time when small utilities are facing increasing demand for water with cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo now growing for the first time in more than 50 years, and datacenter construction on the rise, the demand for clean water in this part of the US is set to rocket in the years ahead.

This has stoked a movement among organizations in Cleveland, which draws 300m gallons of water from the lake for residents every day, and neighboring communities to create a platform to test technologies that measure and monitor water quality.

Cleveland-based researchers will take to the water in the coming weeks to deploy hundreds of sensor buoys to 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,” says Bryan Stubbs of the Cleveland Water Alliance, a non-profit that’s working with about 300 companies, research institutions and government agencies to develop clean water solutions on and around Lake Erie that can be deployed across the world.

“This idea of test bedding became kind of the secret ingredient of what we’ve done here.”

These efforts, the Cleveland Water Alliance claims, have turned Lake Erie, a body of water almost the size of Belgium, into the largest digitally connected freshwater body of water in the world with hundreds of sensor buoys dotted across the western section of the lake. These 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.

The city’s Case Western University has incubated research for a pilot program technology that can capture 90% of microplastics down to 50 microns in washing machines, preventing these materials from ending up back in Lake Erie, which is particularly vulnerable to pollution due to its shallow depth and propensity to quickly warm 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% of the Great Lakes’ water but 50% 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 – farming, manufacturing and residential – in its watershed whose waste regularly ends up in the lake. The western section of the 210-mile-wide lake suffers especially from agricultural runoff in the form of phosphates that enter from the Maumee River.

The challenges to cleaning up the lake, environmentalists say, are huge.

“Scientists and others say we need a 40% phosphorus reduction to minimize the blooms. About 90% 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.

While efforts to reduce the amount of commercial fertilizer have succeeded in a 50% fall in 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.

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 $500m on water treatment upgrades after severe algae blooms in 2014 made the region’s lake water poisonous, forcing 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.

That, in part, is what’s fueling efforts by the Cleveland Water Alliance to position Lake Erie as an open-air research facility.

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-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 frazil ice, which can in turn 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.”