Mark Houser is a Solid Waste Specialist for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) who uses his passion for SCUBA diving to help clean up lakes in state parks.
Solid waste specialists work with a broad range of waste types and management activities, including transportation, storage, processing, landfill inspections, and burning complaints.
Since 2010, he has organized an Earth Day dive to clean up trash at various state park lakes.
Last year, Mark teamed up with Commonwealth employees from the departments of Transportation and Banking and Securities, along with members of the Harrisburg area SCUBA diving community, to conduct a shore and underwater lake cleanup at Pine Grove Furnace State Park’s Fuller Lake [in Adams County].
Ten divers and six non-divers removed approximately 10 pounds of trash, ranging from old aluminum cans to a burn barrel and children’s toys, from the bottom of the lake.
Mark pulled a reclining metal lawn chair out of Fuller Lake -- one of the more surprising things he’s found. The most common thing the divers find are cans and plastic bottles.
Mark says that although many divers his age were encouraged by watching “Sea Hunt” and Jacques Cousteau, he found inspiration from watching “Thunderball” with Sean Connery.
“That was the first time I saw SCUBA diving, and I was just awestruck by it,” Mark says.
Since then, he has done many recreational dives and is a certified PADI SCUBA Instructor. Diving has brought him to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean so far.
His next big trip will probably be diving Silfra in Iceland. Mark said he “was going to dive Loch Ness to look for old Nessie, but the dive shop nearest to there in Scotland advised against it.”
Diving was purely recreational for him until he began working for DEP, when he began to realize how trash can get everywhere and how to stop the problem from getting worse.
When reading about plastic particles being found inside marine life, Mark couldn’t help but think that Pennsylvania’s aquatic life was suffering the same fate as well.
“Sadly, I would find stuff on most of my dives, so it made sense to organize an Earth Day dive.” Mark stresses that people should be conscious that just because it falls in the water doesn’t mean it is gone, and “eventually it will make it to the ocean, one way or another.”
Plastics do break down, eventually -- it takes about 100 years. While the immediate effects on water quality and habitat may be obvious, the long-term effects of plastic pollution are yet to be discovered.
This year’s dive is at Locust Lake State Park, [in Schuylkill County] and he expects 40-50 divers to show up -- the highest number to date.
Mark enjoys focusing on state park lakes for the dives. He says, “It reveals what hidden gems each state park is and what is going on beneath the surface of the lakes. I’m hoping by moving to different lakes, I can get more [dive] shops interested in doing such cleanup dives of their own.”
Know of a good natured Pennsylvanian who is passionate about outdoor recreation and/or conservation that we should feature? Contact DCNR by sending email to: ra-resource@pa.gov to nominate someone.
(Reprinted from the April 17 DCNR Resource newsletter. Click Here to sign up for your own copy.)
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