Five months after East Lansing banned Spin from offering electric scooter rentals in the city, locals continue to pull out hundreds from the Red Cedar River.

“Out of Bogue Street alone, we pulled out 100 and I think 25,” Cal Lowing, a magnet fisherman, told WSYM.

The e-scooters are among well over 300 pulled from the river over the last year, an issue that prompted the city that’s home to Michigan State University to revoke its contract with scooter company Spin in March, and impose new regulations on similar Lime scooters.

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“We use grappling hooks, magnets, winches. We do it from bridges, from the riverside, in the water, whatever it takes,” Mike Stout, president of the Michigan Waterways Stewards, told CBS News in April. “These things, when they’re entangled in metal and tangled in debris and other bicycles and other stuff down there, it’s tough. It’s really brutal work.”

Those efforts, Stout and Lowing told WSYM, are worth eliminating the serious risks that come with doing nothing.

“It’s the personal safety of someone maybe navigating, whether it be someone on the river or in the river, wading,” Stout said. “Then there’s the hazard of lithium-ion batteries being in the river. The toxicity, and any amount is not good for the environment, let alone hundreds.”

“You look at lithium, it reacts with water,” Lowing added. “It’ll actually ignite. And so once these batteries start decaying in the water, in 20 years, 30 years, what’s going to happen?”

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While the city does not appear to have any organized effort to address the scooters already in the water, city officials have adopted regulations for Lime scooters that require them to be parked at least 500 feet from certain bridges.

At MSU, officials have implemented geo-fencing to disable scooters in certain locations, and the “immediate dispatch of a team member for relocation should an e-scoter end up within 300 feet of the river,” according to CBS.

“This problem that we’re having at Michigan State or East Lansing is not unique just to the area,” Stout told the news site. “It’s in every city across the country where they’re being released, and there’s a waterway. So we have this problem in Ann Arbor and Detroit and Grand Rapids and Columbus and Cleveland and Portland. So we need to see a much-improved oversight.”

It’s the same message in Chicago, where piles of e-bikes dumped into Lake Michigan are prompting environmental concerns and criticism directed at the city-owned Divvy bike share system.

In early August, an Alternative Anglers Association led by Glenn Rischke pulled dozens from the lake, along with plenty of construction materials, and piled it along the Oak Street Beach boardwalk to raise awareness about the growing problem city officials have largely ignored, Block Club Chicago reports.

“All of those bikes you saw, including the fencing, came from a 40-foot section of the lake,” Rischke told the news site. “We had to remove a ton of the fencing before we could even get to the bikes.”

The Oak Street Beach “bike sculpture,” which included 22 bikes removed over two days, represents a mere fraction of the bikes the association has pulled from the lake this summer at Montrose Harbor, near the Shedd Aquarium, and other locations, he said.

“We’ve pulled out over 60 bikes in maybe 2,000 yards’ worth of lakefront,” Rische said.

Unlike East Lansing, officials in Chicago are working to expand the Divvy network managed by rideshare company Lyft, adding 250 more stations and thousands of regular bikes by 2025, according to ABC Chicago.

The city’s Department of Transportation and Lyft, meanwhile, have ignored environmental concerns, issuing a joint statement earlier this month that claimed Divvy evaluates “each bike that comes out of the water to see if it can return to the fleet or if there are parts that can be re-used on other bikes.”

“The city is working with Lyft, the Divvy operator, to improve rebalancing and increase valet services along the lakefront,” the statement read.

Durrell Robertson, a field service operator who worked to dismantle the Oak Street Beach bike sculpture, told Block Club all of the waterlogged ebikes will go directly to the trash.