Bottle Beach BKLYN Cleanup – Sept. 17th
Green in BKLYN recently heard from an awesome group in Philadelpia. United by Blue (who removes one pound of trash from our world’s oceans and waterways for every item of clothing they sell) will be cleaning up two sites in Brooklyn. On September 17th, they’ll be removing tons of trash from “Bottle Beach” and Plumb Beach and are seeking lots of hardworking volunteers! If you can join them, meet at the Ranger Station Parking Lot at 1 Aviation Road in Brooklyn.
Ever think you would see a bottle graveyard? What about a beach that is littered with bottles of every age, shape, whole or fragments, along with toys from yesteryears (many of which are plastic), shoes, bones, toothbrushes, tires and other random discarded items? While a place like this sounds a bit surreal, it does exist and can be found in the Jamaica Bay Unit of Gateway National Recreational Area. “Bottle Beach” can be found along Dead Horse Bay at the bottom edge of Brooklyn.
In the 1920s, the watery marshland separating a series of small islands (with the largest being Barren Island) from mainland Brooklyn was filled in to create NY’s first municipal airport—Floyd Bennett Field. From the 1850s until the last residents of Barren Island were evicted in 1936, Barren Island was home to dozens of factories and rendering plants and received all of the household items from Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The landfill was used until it was capped in the 1930. In the 1950s the cap burst and its contents started to spill into Dead Horse Bay in the 1980s. Ever since then, more of the beach continues to erode exposing thousands of glass bottles and pieces of trash along its shores.
Bottles, plastics, tires and other pieces of trash pose a risk to our beloved oceans, waterways and the creatures that dwell there. Register to join UBB & help clean it up!
Hi all,
Checking into say that we are looking forward to the cleanup this Saturday. Safety first, special care will be taken in dealing with broken glass and sharp items. We will focus on floatables as much as the debris eroding from the site. Our goal is clean waterways, and an improved visitor experience, so we will place a special emphasis on the North and South end of the site where we can make a difference, and get it done safely. I expect that our work will allow for a greater apprecitaion of the windswept expanse of the Jamaica Bay Inlet and Deadhorse Bay. I hope that this effort, and ones like it, will not only improve the water quality of the estuary, but will also allow for improved programming at that location so that seining with a Park Ranger or landing a kayak could be part of the visitor experience. Thanks for the help!
Hi Chris, UBB here! We responded to similar concerns that you wrote about on our facebook wall, and are happy to address some of them here, too! First off, while cleanups aren’t treasure hunting expeditions, they often turn out that way! At almost every cleanup we’ve hosted, whether in West Philadelphia’s Bartram’s Garden or the popular tourist destination Hilton Head, South Carolina, one of our volunteers always finds something unusual!
Bottle beach will be no different than any other cleanup: we’re there to pick up trash, whether it’s shaped like an old toy, an old bottle, a tire, a ratty toothbrush or a plastic bag. But we might come across a few unusual finds along the way! And in response to your toxicity concerns, we are working with park rangers who have hosted many cleanups at this site (with small children) who have assured us that it’s not something we need to worry about at this site.
And you’re darn right all that trash was buried for a reason! If we didn’t put our trash in landfills, we’d leave it all out on the street where it would clog trains (causing flooding) or flow into oceans and waterways (killing marine life). Since the trash at Bottle Beach has become un-buried, we’re doing our part to keep as much trash as is humanly possible out of oceans and waterways.
It might not be what you call a hipster party, but it will definitely be a party! We make cleanups fun and keep our volunteers engaged with games and prizes. And you bet we want to clean up the environment! It’s why we’ve hosted over 50 cleanups at all kinds of sites and removed around 30,000 pounds of trash from oceans and waterways so that it doesn’t flow into marine ecosystems. There’s always a point to picking up trash—it’s the only way we can keep it from flowing into our precious water sources.
As we mentioned on our facebook wall, cleanups aren’t about making things prettier. They’re about reducing the amount of trash that ends up in our oceans, where it does a lot more damage than it does in landfills. We have done plenty of cleanups at areas that receive more foot traffic than bottle beach, but foot traffic isn’t usually one of the factors we consider when selecting cleanup sites.
We picked this location, and we are proud to stand by our decision to remove trash from oceans and waterways at Bottle Beach and at every other cleanup site we choose. If this site isn’t for you, you’re more than welcome to check out some of our other upcoming cleanups at http://www.unitedbyblue.com/cleanup-home! And shoot us an email at cleanup@ unitedbyblue.com if you have any other concerns!
Re reading this description – it looks like this is actually a treasure hunting expedition and has nothing to do with cleaning up trash. Correct me if I am wrong. What about “United Blue “who removes one pound of trash from our world’s oceans and waterways for every item of clothing they sell”"?? It would appear they want to go bottle and old toy collecting rather than actually clean up real trash. Am I missing something here? Where is the “Green” part of asking volunteers to go broken bottle collecting at a place almost nobody goes? besides a lot of that old garbage was toxic and the soil is hazardous. It’s garbage for a reason. It was BURIED FOR A REASON!
So is this just some hipster party? Or do you guys actually want to clean the environment? What a joke. It’s irresponsible to dig through broken glass and expose people to toxic and likely buried chemicals that could cause harm to people or make them sick. Mercury, lime and all kinds of crap is buried in that dump, so is it really worth being poisoned to get a little crushed bottle or beer can?
Barren Island is a garbage dump, that’s why there is so much garbage there. THERE IS NO POINT PICKING UP TRASH AT THE DUMP. Isn’t Barren Island basically a mountain of garbage being slowly eroded by the sea? THUS if you have people go and pick up garbage off the beach it is a waste of time because there is no pristine beach under the trash – the trash is of the beach itself SO if you do get people to show up out in the middle of nowhere to pick up all that “trash” you are just skimming off a very thin layer of a landfill! You really want people to gather trash at a place where VERY FEW PEOPLE EVER EVEN GO? Why not gather trash in more public places like parks or farther north? Or at least around a more populated area? Who picked this location? Why should I go all the way there to spend my time trying to beautify a dump that will just have more garbage surface in a few days as the water laps against the shore?