KAYSVILLE, Utah (ABC4 News) – Plastic bottles, chairs, and oil are littering the Great Salt Lake.
When it rains, water rushes downstream through Kaysville City streets, picking up trash and plastic along the way.
A lot of the debris passes through The Nature Conservancy’s Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve before ending up in the Lake.
The runoff has been a city problem for years and is not only unhealthy for nature but for people too.
Kaysville City and The Nature Conservancy in Utah have partnered together to clean up the mess with a long term solution.
Together they built three wildlife-friendly-wetland basins that will hold all the filtered water collected from trash runoff.
Kaysville City’s stormwater will be funneled into the structure, which has a screen to stop trash in its tracks as well as catch silt.
The filtered water will be released into shallow manmade preserves just outside of Kaysville City.
The structure was created to improve water quality for the city and stop the debris from getting to the Great Salt Lake.
The litter will be picked up and properly and disposed of on a regular basis. Chris Christesen, principal engineer with Equinox Engineering says pick up’s will occur every 3 to 4 months.
The project will cost anywhere from 300 thousand to half a million dollars to complete. Christiansen says it can take anywhere from 1.5 years to design and 10 weeks to build.
The filtered water left behind will be more evenly distributed across this portion of the preserve to promote an increase in wildlife habitat.
The water collected in the preserves will eventually make it to the Great Salt Lake debris and pollutant free.
