In late September, Lake Muskegon in Michigan was officially removed from the list of polluted water bodies in the Great Lakes Region.

Once home to foundries, paper mills, petroleum storage and sewage treatment plants, the lake and several of its tributaries became an aquatic hellhole of pollution and debris, until a massive cleanup and restoration project saw it return to a state of beauty once again.

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Area of Concern (AOC) list is jointly managed with Canada, and recently lost the honor of hosting Lake Muskegon, which had been on the list for over 40 years.

Decades of work and $84 million of operations saw 190,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment—around 58 Olympic-sized swimming pools—and 110,000 tons of sawmill debris removed from the lakebe

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