When Chad Pregracke, founder and president of Living Lands and Waters, picked Memphis for the Alternative Spring Break program, he didn’t just throw a dart at a map. McKellar Lake is filled with small plastics brought in from creeks that flow through the state’s cities. There’s so much to pick up that to effectively combat it, they need as many hands as they can get. 

When the team first got to the lake 13 years ago, the situation was dire. “It was like nothing I had ever seen,” Chad said. The washed up litter was several feet deep and comparable to the levels of pollution found in major cities such as New York City and D.C. Over the course of the program, the crew and its teams of students have helped reduce the amount of waste. Each year, the spring break program picks up over 100,000 pounds of trash.

On July 12th, Nathalie Lasselin, CEO of Aquanath, and Kate Richter Green, Head of Digital Current Programming at BeAlive Studios, joined Pattrn to share about the Rivers are Life film, “Nathalie Lasselin’s Deep Dive”.

The film tells the story of conservation from underneath the water’s surface. When Lasselin noticed the waste issue in the St. Lawrence River, she decided to take action and start cleaning up trash in the river while scuba-diving.