What Happens to Burlington's Dog Waste When the Snow Melts?

There's a Vermont saying the Lake Champlain Committee put best: "The turds don't disappear in the snow."

Burlington averages about 87 inches of snow a year. All winter, dog waste that doesn't get picked up gets buried — out of sight, easy to forget. Then March comes, the snowpack melts, and as the Committee puts it, the thaw "reveals some unpleasant remnants from the winter season." There's even an annual basin-wide volunteer cleanup for exactly this — locals call it "April Stools' Day." One organizer, describing a melted-out park: "Everywhere I looked, there were turds, and it was disgusting."

It's gross. But the part that matters is where it goes next.

The melt is a delivery system

When snow melts over driveways, sidewalks, and roads, it doesn't soak in. It runs off — and in a developed area it runs into storm drains, which empty straight into Lake Champlain with no treatment at all. (That's the difference between the storm sewer and the sanitary sewer: only the latter goes to a treatment plant.) Whatever was sitting on the ground all winter goes along for the ride.

And Lake Champlain has a specific, well-documented vulnerability: phosphorus.

Why phosphorus is the whole ballgame

Phosphorus is the nutrient that feeds the cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) blooms that close Burlington's beaches every summer. It's considered the single greatest threat to the lake's water quality — so serious that the EPA issued a formal cleanup target in 2016 requiring Vermont to cut its phosphorus load by about a third. Urban stormwater runoff is one of the named sources.

Here's where dogs come in. A peer-reviewed 2022 study measured what picking up after your dog actually accomplishes:

Removing dog waste eliminates up to 97% of the phosphorus — and 56% of the nitrogen — it would otherwise add to the local environment.

That's not a feel-good number. Phosphorus is precisely the thing Lake Champlain has too much of, and scooping is one of the few sources an individual can cut to nearly zero, today, for free.

This isn't hypothetical for Lake Champlain

Across the lake in Plattsburgh, a 2017 study used DNA testing to trace where the fecal bacteria at local beaches and rivers was coming from. The finding: "canine" was among the top sources — in both dry weather and after storms — and the researchers explicitly recommended more pet-waste stations.

On the Burlington side, Blanchard Beach has been closed to swimmers since 1991. When a city engineer was asked why, his answer was blunt: "Dog poop is our best guess." (To be fair, that's an educated guess, not a lab result — but it's the city's own engineer saying it.)

And the closures keep coming. Burlington logged 32 beach-closure days in 2022, and 39 by late July 2023. The city shuts a beach the moment E. coli passes 235 per 100 mL — a threshold a lot of dog waste can push past in a hurry.

It's also a health thing — long after it's gone

Even where it never reaches the lake, waste left on the ground isn't harmless. Roundworm eggs from dog feces can survive in soil for a year or more and resist composting, according to the CDC — which is why "out of sight" doesn't mean "gone," especially in yards where kids play.

The easy part

You can't fix Lake Champlain's phosphorus problem by yourself. But the research is unusually clear that consistently picking up after your dog removes almost all of the phosphorus it would contribute — and that the winter backlog, flushed out by the spring thaw, is the worst offender.

That's the part we handle. Scoop There It Is keeps Burlington-area yards clear year-round — including the winter pile-up that would otherwise turn into a spring lake problem. Skip the April archaeology.

---

Notes & sources

• Snowfall: 1991–2020 NWS normal for Burlington. Nutrient-reduction figures: De Frenne et al. 2022 (peer-reviewed). Phosphorus/TMDL: EPA & Lake Champlain Basin Program. DNA study: City of Plattsburgh / LCBP (2017). Closure counts: WCAX & Vermont Public. Full citations + confidence grades: see the backing research file.
• We deliberately left out some popular but poorly-sourced stats (e.g. "100 dogs can close a bay in 2–3 days" and "23 million bacteria per gram") because we couldn't trace them to a primary source. We'd rather be accurate than dramatic.