On Saturday, September 24th a group of students teamed up with one of the workshop clients, NYC H2O, to participate in a large-scale trash cleanup of Plumb Beach in New York City’s Jamaica Bay. NYC H2O, an ecology-focused education non-profit, is one of this semester’s workshop clients, with whom four students, Sophia Robsion, Qiuwei Liu, Xiaoying Li, and Yishan Zhang, are working. Their project is focused around creating an Environmental and Infrastructural Assessment of Plumb Beach and then to turn some of the findings from that study into programmable educational activities that NYC H2O can use to teach middle and high schoolers about the ecology of the site while also actively improving the resiliency, sustainability, and friendliness of the site.
The beach cleanup began with a bus pickup near 14th Street that took a packed school bus of students, corporate employees and community members out to the Plumb Beach site. Located over forty-five minutes from Manhattan, the beach entrance is just off the Rockaways Highway in south Brooklyn, east of Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay. Over 150 people showed up for the cleanup, which included a number of corporate employees participating in philanthropy days, students from NYU and Baruch College among others, young people who wanted to get involved with a cool nonprofit, and community members and families who have long been engaged with NYC H2O for their kid-friendly and educational programs.
Participants were greeted by Matt Melina of NYC H2O and a park ranger from the National Park Service who informed them that they should each take gloves, a heavy-duty trash bag, a trash picker-upper claw, and a worksheet. The worksheet was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and had spaces to record each piece of trash type collected. At the end of the day, these workshops would be incorporated into NOAA’s trash database, providing information about pollution around the world.
The cleanup itself lasted from 10am to 12am, with each participant collected at least one full bag of trash. A garbage truck was positioned in the parking lot to compress the huge amount of stuffs removed by the volunteers. In all, the group removed 160 bags of trash, one ton of large timbers, a stray dock and a hot water heater from the beach.
After the cleanup, there was a big empanada lunch followed by a brief talk with NYC District Councilman Alan Maisel and a marine ecology lesson from Mickey Cohen. While the marine ecology lesson was geared at the kids in attendance – letting them see how a net can catch fish even in the surf and passing around jars of cool fish – it was also great fun for the adults to watch and learn from. To learn more about NYC H2O and to explore pictures from the cleanup, please visit NYC H2O’s website: http://www.nych2o.org/2016.html.
Overall, this was an amazing experience and Cornell looks forward to being involved in the next cleanup hosted by NYC H2O!