Volunteers gathered on Lake Mendota over the weekend to clean litter piles left on the ice following a party on the lake’s surface that took place in spite of the cancellation of Lily’s Classic, which was set to take place Saturday.
Community backlash began after photos of the amount of trash on Lake Mendota from the party spread on social media platforms like Yik Yak, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.
University of Wisconsin senior Ronan Piontek said he saw posts circulating on Yik Yak of fellow students expressing frustration at the state of Lake Mendota, and he decided to take matters into his own hands.
“I was content to just go there by myself and clean up for as long as I could, until I got tired,” Piontek said. “I only brought four bags with me, and they were gone in less than an hour.”
Piontek said he was joined in his efforts by volunteers intermittently, but there was no strategic sweep of the lake. If he had to guess, Piontek said he filled around 10 trash bags of litter by the time he decided to call it quits.
More volunteers showed up at Lake Mendota on Sunday to clean up the remainder of the litter, according to UW expert in lake water quality and lake ice Hilary Dugan.
“What’s special about living in Madison is people really respect the environment here and tend to pick up trash,” Dugan said. “We almost never see what we saw in these pictures on Sunday, which is people just throwing a ton of trash in one area. That was really unique and really disappointing.”
Lily’s Classic is an annual fundraiser and boot hockey tournament held by the UW Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity to raise money for epilepsy research, according to previous reporting by The Badger Herald.
It was announced that the fundraiser event would be cancelled after SAE determined it could not comply with the requirements put forth by the UW administration during negotiations to address ongoing safety concerns, according to WKOW.
“A good amount of the blame for why the lake ended up in the condition that it did lies with the administration for threatening to punish SAE,” Piontek said. “We raised $0 for research, people still went out on the lake and drank, and there was no kind of chain of responsibility [for clean up].”
UW expects its students to, as in all settings, follow the law, not litter and be good neighbors, UW spokesperson John Lucas said in an emailed statement.
Piontek said though the university shares blame, students should be responsible for bringing anything they brought onto the ice off of it with them.
“The lake is part of our community, and covering it in trash just shows zero respect for the lake,” Dugan said. “These are lessons to be learned … one bottle [might not] have a huge impact, but these build up and persist over time.”
