We've got way too much paved impervious surface.

It's making our cities flood and our streams unhealthy.

We're doing something about it.

If you know of a place that needs a little less pavement and a little more green space, please let us know by emailing the location to info@cuyahogariver.org.

Impervious surface covering our watersheds is the most widespread obstacle to restoring water quality in rivers and streams, and has significant negative effect on our ability to restore and protect Lake Erie.

Aside from increasing runoff volume, parking lots contribute nutrient and chemical loading and contaminants from road salt, degraded asphalt, worn tire treads, automotive fluids, fertilizer, and herbicides. 31% of the land in Cuyahoga County alone is covered in impervious surface. Parking lots represent 14% of that total. The Center for Watershed Protection sets 25% impervious as the level above which serious damage to water quality is seen. If we could convert half of that 14% to absorptive greenspace, we could reach the point where we begin to protect rather than damage water quality, air quality, and human health.

It's not only a problem in urban areas, it stretches through suburban and exurban land as well. Opportunities to shrink paved areas abound wherever businesses have more parking lot than they need, or where abandoned lots in urban neighborhoods have disintegrated into particles of asphalt that wash into storm drains. It degrades water quality and lessens the chance for aquatic life to thrive.

Some green infrastructure provides stormwater storage on areas that are already green, or is built to slow rather than prevent runoff at the source. Rain gardens are often placed on greenspaces where infiltration is already happening. Bioswales are built to receive runoff but send the bulk of it down the drain.

The most effective way to reduce the effect of impervious surfaces is to remove the cause - depave the impervious surfaces altogether and replace them with naturalized areas.

DepaveNEO focuses specifically on removing areas of parking lot to reduce the source of runoff.

Sewer districts and wastewater management departments do a limited number of big projects to reduce combined sewer overflow that results when grey infrastructure - pipes - are overloaded in heavy rains.

DepaveNEO is designed to create hundreds of smaller permeable surface areas, distributed throughout watersheds, to infiltrate more stormwater and snowmelt right where the runoff begins.

DepaveNEO and Cuyahoga ReLeaf.

We're eternally grateful to the volunteers who braved the rain, wind, and snow to remove more than 5,000 square feet of impervious parking lot and plant new trees to manage stormwater, send clean filtered water into our streams,
river, and lake, and increase the watershed's forest canopy.