UBB Removed 2,637 Pounds of Trash from One Brooklyn Beach

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Location: Gateway National Recreational Area Brooklyn NY

Date: September 17, 20119:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Our "Bottle Beach" cleanup was an interesting cleanup to say the least. As far as beaches go, this was definitely the dirtiest beach we've cleaned. This was not the kind of beach where you want to lay out your beach towel or go for a romantic stroll alongside, it is primarily used by fisherman. One direction of the beach contained the usual trash suspects--plastic bags, plastic bottles, food wrappers and styrofoam containers, but as we walking the other way was a trip through time.  

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 1930s. The cap burst in the 1950s and its contents started to spill into Dead Horse Bay in the 1980s. The beach is constantly eroding, exposing thousands of glass bottles and pieces of trash along its shores.

Toward the right, we noticed a time warp of trash; toys from the 50s, old shoe soles, hundreds of glass bottles from throughout the 1900s, two dozen tires and even more buried in the layers of sand. All in all, our six hour cleanup produced 2,637 pounds of trash. Our weird trash collection included a 50s action figure, a milk jug bitten by a shark, a lightbulb, car motor, 24 tires, a stuffed bear with a hook in it, glass Clorox and Lysol jars, a metal guitar and packet of ketchup from 2004. 

United By Blue would like to thank our dedicated volunteers, Kingsborough Community College Students, Green in BKLYN blog, Atlas Roll-Off Corp, Starbucks of Brighton Beach and National Park Service rangers.