A team of divers recently removed 200 pounds of debris from Lake Tahoe in a single tank dive on the first day of a six-month effort to clean up the alpine lake.

Organized by a local nonprofit called Clean Up the Lake, the project aims to be the largest trash cleanup in Lake Tahoe’s history. Straddling the California-Nevada border, it gets about 20 million visitors per year. The dive team plans to dive three days per week from now until November to depths of about 25 feet, collecting rubbish along the 72-mile shoreline.

During the most recent cleanup, divers collected fishing poles, tires, aluminum cans and bottles, and much more. They unearthed 20 heavy or especially large items, like buckets of dried cement and car bumpers, that will need to be extracted at a later date by a boat with a crane.

“We are still learning not to be so wasteful,” Colin West, founder of Clean Up the Lake, tells AP News. “But unfortunately, as a species we still are, and there are a lot of things down there.”

West had been cleaning the beaches of Lake Tahoe for some time when a dive buddy told him about an underwater cleanup in 2018. During that dive, 600 pounds of trash had been pulled out of Lake Tahoe. This knowledge motivated the Stateline, Nevada resident to ramp up his efforts.

“I was blown away, and we started researching and going underneath the surface and we kept pulling up trash and more trash,” West says.

Clean Up the Lake hosted its first debris dive September 2019.West’s team of divers, supported by kayakers, boaters and jet skiers removed more than 300 pounds of trash from the lake’s eastern shore and planned to continue up the shoreline during 2020.

The pandemic slowed progress, but the group continued to dive and collect litter as often as was safe. By the end of last summer, they had collected over four tons of trash from Lake Tahoe and neighboring Donner Lake.

The new, 6-month push to clean Lake Tahoe will cost $250,000, which are being covered by grants administered to Clean Up the Lake.