EAST LANSING, MI — Electric scooter disposal has reached absurd levels at Michigan State University. According to an environmental group, the vehicles parked around campus are constantly ending up in the river.

Michigan Waterways Stewards have removed nearly 260 battery-powered scooters from Lansing-area rivers over the past two years — the “vast majority” of which came from the Red Cedar River, which flows through the East Lansing campus.

Last week alone, five scooters were confiscated.

“The biggest hotspot was the Bogue Street Bridge – that’s where we probably found two-thirds of all the scooters,” said Mike Stout, founder of Michigan Waterways Stewards.

“But all the bridges across campus were problematic.”

The elimination of e-scooters – a trendy and sometimes loved and sometimes hated form of motorized transportation in urban areas – has become an increasingly serious problem in East Lansing over the past year after the city government revoked the license of a struggling e-scooter company with which the university has ties.

In 2021, Michigan State signed a deal with Spin, a former subsidiary of Ford Motor Co., to bring 600 e-scooters to campus as part of a micromobility trend that has seen similar pay-to-ride devices rolled out on other campuses and in cities across Michigan and the U.S.

Shortly afterwards, vandals began throwing scooters into the river.

The exact number of e-scooters lost in the Grand and Red Cedar rivers is difficult to determine, but Stout believes that, taking into account official recoveries, the number could be closer to 350.

The Michigan Waterways Stewards formed in late 2022 and began pulling scooters and other trash from the Red Cedar River in December of that year. Since then, the stewards’ group has enlisted the help of fishermen to pull the scooters from the river using high-powered magnets that they have thrown from bridges with a rope.

In the water, e-scooters pose an environmental threat because they are powered by lithium batteries that pose a fire hazard and contain toxic solvents and polymers that can harm wildlife.

Stout praised MSU for the steps taken to remedy the situation, but called Spin’s response disappointing.

After much back and forth, Stout said, the company informed the group last year that it had lost about 80, a number that was “much lower than what we had already recovered.”

“Spin spreads misinformation and false reporting,” he said.

As of Aug. 15, Stout said, administrators had recovered 259 scooters from Lansing-area rivers — some from the Grand River, but most from the Red Cedar. The total across the region rises to about 340 when the recovery reported by Spin is included, he said.

According to East Lansing driver’s license revocation hearing documents, “approximately 280” spin scooters have been removed from the Red Cedar River in the past three years.

“As far as we know, this is probably the highest number of scooters discarded and abandoned in rivers or waterways in the entire country,” Stout said.

In early March, the East Lansing City Council confirmed the city’s planned 2023 revocation of a license allowing Spin to operate scooters in the city, citing persistent illegally parked scooters as violating local ordinance.

Lime, a competitor of Spin, still offers scooters in East Lansing.

Michigan State University is maintaining its relationship with Spin, which was acquired by rival Bird last year. Bird emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy this spring and is operating Spin under a new umbrella company called Third Lane Mobility.

The university renewed its spin contract in March.

In their response to MLive, MSU and Spin each independently published the same bullet point list, detailing almost verbatim the measures being taken to curb scooter littering on campus.

Michigan State spokesman Mark Bullion and Spin spokesman Jimmy Gillman said via email that all bridges have been geofenced to prevent scooter parking and deployment areas have been moved away from the river. “Rebalancing operations” are conducted daily around the river, and if a scooter is parked within 300 feet of the river, an “immediate dispatch” and pickup occurs.

Gillman said scooters offset the campus’s carbon emissions and Bullion called them “an affordable, convenient way for our students, faculty and staff to get around campus quickly and efficiently,” helping to reduce cars and bikes.

Such vandalism and littering are obviously illegal in Michigan — where penalties for littering were recently increased — but Stout said practical limitations on police resources limit law enforcement’s ability to respond to and investigate such dumping.

Similar large-scale disposals of mobility aids are also taking place in other US cities. Volunteers from Chicago were busy pulling Divvy bikes out of Lake Michigan this summer.

In Washington, vandals throw scooters into the Spokane River. In Kansas, they end up in the Arkansas River. In New York, they end up in the Bronx River.

Stout noted that it’s not just scooters that are littering the waters. Magnet fishermen have pulled up plenty of bicycles, shopping carts and other large trash.

He hopes that increasing awareness will help cities and universities work together to find solutions.

Better safety mechanisms for scooters could help, he said.

One day, Stout took a spin scooter without paying for it as an experiment to see how easy it would be for a vandal to dispose of one. An alarm went off three times, but then stopped. No passersby paid any attention to the piercing noise.

Imagine having to do this at 2 a.m. when no one is there, he said.

“I just pushed it to the bridge and could have thrown it overboard if I wanted to,” he said. “There needs to be real deterrents so that you can’t just let a non-rented bike or scooter run and do what’s happening.”

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