Dear Anne,

Your New York State Senator is one of 18 legislators who showed exceptional leadership when it came to protecting the health of the environment this year by supporting all four of the environmental community’s priority Super Bills.

The Super Bills include:

*The Wetlands Protection Act

*The Bigger Better Bottle Bill

*The Global Warming Pollution Cap/Greenhouse Gas Pollution Control Act

*Net Metering Reforms

Please thank your New York State Senators for supporting these critical measures. Without his or her leadership, these bills may never have gotten as far as they did in the Senate. By taking the time to recognize your Senator’s support of the Super Bills, you’re telling our lawmakers that the environment is an important issue to you and to thousands of New Yorkers across the state. Click here to thank your Senator.

I believe I will! It is important to note that only one of these four Super Bills actually became law (the Net Metering Reforms) so we have a long way to go. More details on the bills, including their Assembly supporters, are available here.

Rebecca’s container gardening demonstration

Last Sunday’s event, “Greening Flatbush: Garden Where You Are” was a huge success! The Sustainable Flatbush Gardening Committee assembled a stellar program of speakers and demonstrations on topics including Container Gardening, Urban Composting, Street Trees, Permaculture and more.

Mela and Sandra talk trees

Karla advocates for worm composting

We can’t wait for spring to get our hands dirty and start planting up the neighborhood!

“This local law is good for the City’s environment and makes sound economic sense,” said Basil Seggos, Riverkeeper’s Chief Investigator. “By regarding stormwater as a resource for irrigating the landscape, we not only improve water quality, but also capture all the added economic benefits of green infrastructure, including cooler streets, reduced energy costs (by reducing building cooling needs), cleaner air, sequestration and reduction of global warming pollution, flood mitigation, and more livable communities.”

Follow the link below to read the complete press release…

New York City to Clean Up Waterways by Greening Roadways and Roofs
City Council Adopts New Measure for Sustainable Stormwater Management Plan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Jenny Powers, Natural Resources Defense Council: 212/727-4566
Alan Saly, LCG Communications: 718/853-5568
Teresa Crimmens, Bronx River Alliance: 718/430-4690
Basil Seggos, Riverkeeper: 917/597-6883
Kate Zidar, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice: 718/328-5622
Rob Crauderueff, Sustainable South Bronx: 718/617-4668
Paul Mankiewicz, The Gaia Institute 718/885-1906

New York City to Clean Up Waterways by Greening Roadways and Roofs
City Council Adopts New Measure for Sustainable Stormwater Management Plan

NEW YORK (January 30th, 2008) – The New York City Council passed legislation today to tackle the sewage overflow problem in the City’s overburdened sewer system. The legislation advances the implementation of green design elements, which mimic nature’s own filtering systems, into the City’s existing streets, parks, and other public spaces and into existing and new development projects.

By adopting ‘green infrastructure’ solutions, such as green roofs, permeable pavement, wetland restoration, and smarter design of street tree plantings, stormwater can be captured where it falls and used to green the city, instead of overwhelming sewers and flushing raw sewage directly into City waterways. The legislation, City Council Intro No. 630, ensures that New York City will follow through with the initiatives outlined in Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030, by requiring the development of a city-wide Sustainable Stormwater Management Plan focusing on such measures. The mayor is expected to sign it into law.

“The adoption of this local law means cleaner rivers and bays in all five boroughs – and, literally, a greener New York City,” said Larry Levine, Natural Resources Defense Council attorney. “Green infrastructure is the perfect blend of simple common sense and innovative technology. Green roofs, smarter design of tree plantings, porous surfaces for parking lots and roads, and other creative uses of urban landscaping – all of these things help rainfall evaporate or soak into the ground, rather than polluting the nearest water body and causing our city’s overburdened sewer system to overflow with raw sewage. It’s a win-win.”

Currently, more than 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and polluted stormwater discharge out of 460 combined sewer overflows (“CSOs”) into New York Harbor each year. Although water quality in the harbor has improved significantly over the last few decades, most of the waterfront and its beaches are still unsafe for recreation after it rains. New York City’s outmoded sewer system combines sewage from buildings with dirty stormwater from streets. As little as one-tenth of an inch of rain can overload the system, causing raw sewage to overflow into the harbor.

The city’s most recent plans for addressing this problem, submitted to the state Department of Environmental Conservation last year, would reduce these sewer overflows by only about 40% – leaving about 17 billion gallons still pouring into waterbodies around the city each year.

Storm Water Infrastructure Matters (S.W.I.M.) – a coalition of more than 50 organizations, including community and environmental groups, environmental justice organizations, architects, water engineers, and community development corporations – partnered with Councilmember James Gennaro, Chair of the City Council’s Environmental Protection Committee, to advance the landmark legislation. In addition to providing a roadmap for solutions to the CSO problem, the law requires the City to notify the public when sewer overflows occur, so recreational boaters, kayakers, swimmers, and fishermen can take appropriate precautions.

“Currently, there is no mechanism for alerting people who work or recreate on New York City’s waterways to the time and place of sewer overflows,” said Kate Zidar, Environmental Planner for Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. “While we work toward the long term goal of preventing CSOs altogether, this new law will ensure that the city keeps the public informed of sewage overflows to protect public health – and to make sure people know the importance of solving this problem.”

CSOs and stormwater runoff not only make waters unsightly and unsafe for recreation after a rainfall due to the release of raw sewage, they also significantly harm aquatic ecosystems, by lowering dissolved oxygen levels, contaminating the food web, and persisting in sediments for the long term. Stormwater that enters the sewers carries litter, petrochemicals from roadways, pesticides fertilizers from landscaped areas, and even pet waste.

“This local law is good for the City’s environment and makes sound economic sense,” said Basil Seggos, Riverkeeper’s Chief Investigator. “By regarding stormwater as a resource for irrigating the landscape, we not only improve water quality, but also capture all the added economic benefits of green infrastructure, including cooler streets, reduced energy costs (by reducing building cooling needs), cleaner air, sequestration and reduction of global warming pollution, flood mitigation, and more livable communities.”

“Too frequently, opportunities for creating jobs for the poor are missed when planning for our future, said Rob Crauderueff, Sustainable Alternatives Director for Sustainable South Bronx. “This legislation creates a vehicle for improving job training and job creation for green jobs – while supporting the development of local markets in the process. We can make our waterways and economy accessible for all New Yorkers by building and maintaining green infrastructure and green-collar jobs throughout New York City.”

“Many New Yorkers have already shown a commitment to this type of greening, which is endorsed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a cost-effective tool for reducing urban water pollution, and already being implemented in dozens of cities around the globe, including Chicago, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Seattle in the U.S.,” said Teresa Crimmens, Ecology Director of the Bronx River Alliance. “The passage of this local law shows the City of New York’s commitment to make the water cleaner by making the city greener.”

“This new law builds on Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, which is already on the right track with plans to plant a million new trees, improve parks in every neighborhood, and provide tax incentives for green roofs,” said Dr. Paul Mankiewicz, Executive Director of the Gaia Institute. “With widespread implementation of green infrastructure throughout the city, we could ultimately capture over a billion gallons of stormwater from a single storm, and plant enough vegetation to reverse the urban heat island and significantly decrease the air conditioning expenses and associated air pollution in New York City.”

The S.W.I.M. coalition also supports other initiatives pending before the City Council and City Planning Commission to promote the use of green infrastructure in New York City, including zoning and other legislative requirements that would ensure that all of the million trees to be planted under PlaNYC are installed in common-sense ways that optimize their stormwater capture potential.

#####
SWIM (Storm Water Infrastructure Matters) is a coalition of more than 50 organizations dedicated to ensuring swimmable waters around New York City through natural, sustainable storm water management practices in our neighborhoods. This approach is environmentally and fiscally responsible because it utilizes storm water, currently viewed as a waste, as a resource. For more information on CSOs and green infrastructure solutions in New York City, go to www.swimmablenyc.org.

The full text of Intro. 630 is available here

And if we are going to think that expansively about how we might use our streetscape, we might go even further, to imagine a few parking spaces per building permanently turned into “eco-spaces,” with islands bulging into the streets to calm traffic, with plantings to absorb rainfall that would otherwise flow into the sewers and to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, perhaps with small-scale rat-proofed composting receptacles, or igloos for depositing recyclables, or …. the mind reels.

YES! And this is only Part One!

Answers From the Garbage Expert

By The New York Times

 

Benjamin Miller (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)

Benjamin Miller, an expert on the history of New York City’s trash, is taking questions from readers this week. This is his first set of answers.

ADM: why doesn’t the city recycle glass? this seems inexcusable to me.

Mr. Miller: The city does recycle glass. When we designed the city’s recycling program, we determined that the way to achieve the best balance between the adverse environmental impacts of running additional collection trucks through New York City and the overall economics of collection and processing costs and recycling revenues was to collect glass in the same truck hopper with metal and plastic. In order to minimize truck miles — since trucking produces some of the most significant environmental consequences associated with waste management — these trucks must have compaction blades. This means that a significant portion of the bottles will be broken. But broken glass does not reduce the marketability of the more valuable metal and plastic (as it would the marketability of paper). And although it is difficult to make new glass bottles from the city’s collections, because bottles require color-sorted glass and sorting is easier with whole bottles, the mixed-color cullet (glass shards) that New York’s program produces can be used in a variety of construction applications and to make products such as fiberglass insulation, beads for reflective paint, sandblast medium, concrete blocks, and glass tiles.

ADM: if i leave some large piece of recyclable metal (for example, a steel bed frame) out with the garbage, what are the odds that it will be recycled vs. just being thrown in with the landfill-bound garbage?

Mr. Miller: If you put it out the night before your designated recycling day, it should be recycled.

Tom B: Why doesn’t the City of New York recycle plastic bags? Is there a broader policy decision in the making regarding the proliferation of plastic shopping bags in the City? (i.e., prohibiting their distribution within the City, or offering incentives to use paper…)

Mr. Miller: Film plastic is not as easy to recycle as the #1 and #2 bottles that the city currently collects. Because it is relatively light, awkward to handle on mechanical processing lines, and its mixed resins have a relatively low value, less than 4 percent of film plastics in the country are recycled, compared to 25 percent of plastic bottles. But it is recyclable, into products such as trash can liners, pipes, and plastic wood. Since plastic bags represent about 5 percent of the city’s waste stream, they offer a significant opportunity for diverting more waste from landfills.

In my view, recycling systems in a place as logistically complex as New York is should be thought of in two parts: the front-end, where the city’s residents are responsible for sorting and setting materials out at the curb, and the back-end, where the city or its contractors are responsible for collecting, processing, and marketing the materials. The rules for the front-end should be as simple as possible and should never change. The back-end should be flexibly managed to take advantage of changes in technologies and markets. Materials that are potentially recyclable — such as all clean plastics and textiles — should always be collected for recycling. When technologies and markets allow these materials to be cost-effectively processed and sold, they will be available in the recycling stream. When they cannot be processed and sold, they can be disposed of with other unusable residue; if the collection and processing system has been efficiently engineered, the net cost of disposing of this residue should not be prohibitively more expensive than if it had been collected with the regular garbage in the first place.

Since we can predict that the price of oil, the primary ingredient in film plastic, will continue to rise, it seems very likely that film plastic will have an economic market in the years ahead. As for the more general chicken-and-egg question of which comes first — recycling or markets for recyclables — the answer is that investments in manufacturing infrastructure are more likely to take place after a demonstrated supply of recyclables of known quality is available.

Of course it would be even better to reduce the number of plastic bags used. Rather than prohibiting them — or encouraging greater use of paper bags, which have more significant adverse environmental consequences — I would argue that we should use economic incentives. The best would be an across-the-board one: charging people by the bag for the waste they throw away, rather than including a large hidden charge in every resident’s property taxes. Failing that, there could be a charge or tax for any type of non-reusable shopping bag.

Topic: A number of questioners asked why New Yorkers put garbage on the sidewalks in plastic bags, waiting for “overnight” collection trucks, where they are unsightly, accessible to rats, and a source of objectionable odors.

Mr. Miller: Apart from single-family areas, it clearly is not possible for refuse to be collected from garages or backyards. Nor does New York have alleys running behind buildings where waste could be set out, as in cities such as Washington and Philadelphia. Nor is there room on most streets for permanent dumpsters.

Until the New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969, New Yorkers did use metal garbage cans (or “ash cans” as they were known when most buildings still burned coal and painters such as John Sloan, of “the ash can school,” painted gritty street life scenes). Plastic bags offer many advantages over cans: they create less sleep-shattering noise; they can be slung underhanded into truck hoppers more quickly than cans can be dragged from the curb, lifted, emptied, and returned, while producing far fewer worker injuries; they do not have to be hauled back into basements and hosed out and stored and repaired; they are never stolen.

Unfortunately, rats also love them. And since the only way to eliminate rats is to eliminate their food supply, we have a significant incentive to think more creatively about how we set our waste out on the street.

Though municipal trucks (as opposed to commercial-waste haulers) generally do not collect waste at night (they start at 7 a.m. in the winter, 6 a.m. in the summer), people are allowed to set out their waste the evening before. This is not a good idea. The rules should be changed so that unless the waste is in a rigid, closed container, it cannot be set out more than a few hours before the scheduled pickup time.

The best solution, of course, would prevent rats from having even a few hours for breakfast — while still allowing efficient collection and protecting sanitation workers’ backs. The rigid roll-out containers typically stored in single-family garages can be emptied very efficiently by the robotic arms that many suburban garbage trucks use. (These containers would also offer a convenient way to charge residents on the basis of how much trash they throw away, which would provide a strong incentive to reduce waste, and save New York and its property-tax-payers a great deal of money.) Unfortunately, robotic arms could not reach over the parked cars lining most New York City curbs to reach containers on the sidewalk.

It would take a major rethinking of our parking arrangements — and perhaps of our union agreements for the number of workers per truck — but if the equivalent of one or two parking spaces, per apartment building, were reserved for sanitation collections for a few hours a few times a week, we might be able to dramatically reduce our rat population, our collection costs, and our worker injuries.

And if we are going to think that expansively about how we might use our streetscape, we might go even further, to imagine a few parking spaces per building permanently turned into “eco-spaces,” with islands bulging into the streets to calm traffic, with plantings to absorb rainfall that would otherwise flow into the sewers and to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, perhaps with small-scale rat-proofed composting receptacles, or igloos for depositing recyclables, or …. the mind reels.

Michael Miscione: What about incinerators for helping to lighten New York City’s garbage overload? I understand that modern incinerators are relatively harmless. Is that really the case? If so, is this an option that New York City should be considering?

adm: I understand Arlington, Va., has a waste-to-energy plant that incinerates 100 percent of its trash to create about 30 percent of its power needs. Is it feasible to do something like this in NYC, or for parts of NYC? What are the obstacles and downsides?

Mr. Miller: For a nation that relies predominantly on oil, much of it from the Middle East — a nation that is burning an ever-increasing quantity of coal, a major source of atmospheric carbon and mercury; where it appears that a new generation of nuclear power plants may soon be built, despite the fact that issues associated with the long-term management of nuclear wastes have not yet been resolved; and where more than half of all wastes are landfilled, despite the fact that landfills release a significant proportion of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases — the answer, in George Tenet’s immortal phrase, is a slam dunk.

Also, in many cases, it’s cheaper. And if not now, it soon will be, as both landfill prices and energy costs continue to climb.

Whether or not a waste-to-energy incinerator is sited within the city or simply nearby (much of Manhattan’s residential refuse is now burned at a plant just across the Hudson in Newark), the environmental benefits — including those from not having to haul our waste hundreds of miles to landfills in other states — will be significant.

By the way, if most relatively difficult-to-recycle, nonchlorinated plastics, like bags, were burned in waste-to-energy plants, the overall adverse environmental impacts might be less than they would be if they were collected, processed, and transported for recycling.
Red: What is your opinion of the city’s proposed waste management plan which focuses on marine transfer stations (the one currently objected to by West Side state assemblymembers)?

Mr. Miller: Compared to the current situation, which requires white sanitation trucks from all over the city to drive to transfer stations that are located in only a couple of neighborhoods, using dispersed marine transfer stations makes a great deal of sense. Our garbage trucks will drive a million fewer miles each year on city streets.

That is not to say, however, that we could not do even better. Putting garbage in containers on barges is only the first step in a long and costly process: in order to reach a landfill, the containers will have to be lifted out of the barges somewhere else within New York Harbor, and then placed on trains or ocean-going craft. This extra handling is very expensive. So is containerizing the waste in the first place. Since many more landfills are accessible by rail than can be reached by ocean-going barges, it would make a great deal of sense, wherever possible, to put the waste directly onto railcars. And there may be more cost-effective ways to package the waste than in steel containers.

It happens that there is a rail line on the West Side that has the potential to haul waste out of the city. The best way to do that might be through a series of relatively small-scale, linear transfer facilities arranged along and above the rail right-of-way. Having multiple plants would reduce the space requirements for each, while also reducing the number of trucks in any one neighborhood.

Recyclable materials, however — since the City’s new recycling plant on the Brooklyn waterfront is designed to minimize deliveries by truck — will need to go into barges. That leaves the question of which piers would be most suitable for transferring recyclables — a question that should depend primarily on where the truck impacts would be least. Alternatives that have been considered so far are at Gansevoort Street and across from the Javits Center. There are also City transfer stations (one of which is not used at present, but nonetheless offers relatively good truck access) at West 59th Street and West 135th Street. And other locations might also be considered. The optimal answer—because it would reduce the truck miles associated with just one plant — might be more than one.

But the most important question associated with transfer stations is: Where (and how) will the waste (or recyclables, or compostables) be processed or disposed? Until we know the answer to that, it is impossible to plan a rational transfer network, since we don’t know how many plants we will need, of what type, or where to put them. For example, if we had access to another nearby waste-to-energy facility (or compost plant), we might not need even need a transfer station for that waste shed. (Waste from the West Side of Manhattan is not transferred, but driven straight to the Essex County waste-to-energy plant in white garbage trucks.)

Michael Miscione: I understand that you feel strongly that the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island was a big mistake. Why do you think that?

Mr. Miller: There are New York City firemen who blame Rudy Giuliani for some of the problems that developed on and after 9/11. I suspect that there will be residents of states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina, who will blame Rudy Giuliani for the decision to send to their backyards all of the waste generated in New York City, despite the fact that New York’s landfill had decades of remaining capacity and, because of hundreds of millions of dollars spent in its latter years on environmental improvements, was one of the best-managed landfills in the country.

I would suspect that future generations of New Yorkers, too, will blame him for an inexorable increase in their waste disposal costs, which in recent years has escalated at an annual rate equivalent to the salaries of about 300 full-time city employees. Fortunately, the Bloomberg administration has managed to keep the city in the black. We know, however, that every city faces the prospect of economic downturns. (This may be especially true of one as dependent as ours is on a single “industry.”) Someday we may regret the irreversible luxury of sending our waste far away, and pine for more police officers and nurses.

Water Conservation: Quench Your Thirst for Information
What better way to jumpstart a sustainable summer than to learn about water conservation! Join us in our upcoming forum where we will discuss how to use water efficiently and focus on water conservation technology readily available for both residential and commercial use. Our speaker will provide a combination of practical points for homeowners and specification information for design professionals from a regional and global perspective.

When: Wednesday, July 18, 2007, 6:30-8:00 pm

Where: Church Street School for Music & Art
74 Warren Street, Manhattan
1,2,3,A,C trains to Chambers Street; R,W trains to City Hall

Speaker: Warren C. Liebold, Director, Technical Services/Conservation, Bureau of Customer Services, New York City Department of Environmental Protection

This article in Fast Company magazine, “Message In A Bottle” by Charles Fishman, brings the bottled water discussion to another level. While I highly recommend reading the entire article, here are a few selected bits:

• Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We–a generation raised on tap water and water fountains–drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we’re raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We’ve come to pay good money–two or three or four times the cost of gasoline–for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes.

• We buy bottled water because we think it’s healthy. Which it is, of course: Every 12-year-old who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a 16-ounce Coke is inarguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn’t healthier, or safer, than tap water. Indeed, while the United States is the single biggest consumer in the world’s $50 billion bottled-water market, it is the only one of the top four–the others are Brazil, China, and Mexico–that has universally reliable tap water.

• …if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000. Taste, of course, is highly personal. New Yorkers excepted, Americans love to belittle the quality of their tap water. But in blind taste tests, with waters at equal temperatures, presented in identical glasses, ordinary people can rarely distinguish between tap water, springwater, and luxury waters.

• Pepsi has the nation’s number-one-selling bottled water, Aquafina, with 13% of the market. Coke’s Dasani is number two, with 11% of the market. Both are simply purified municipal water–so 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi for our convenience.

• The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity–something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

While this is all quite outrageous, one potential response is very simple: carry a reusable bottle and fill it with the local product, for free. Put a label on it that reads “Kensington Spring” or “Eau de Inwood” or Acqua Santa Astoria”… and drink up!

Wilton provided some fascinating historical perspective on New York City’s infrastructure; I was particularly intrigued to learn of our transition from a city that was once able to sell its “night soil” (waste from outhouses) to farmers on Long Island for fertilizer, to our current garbage situation requiring massive daily truck caravans to cart our waste to faraway locations, at huge municipal expense. Joan also spoke eloquently of the city’s human resources – energy of youth, wisdom of elders, richness of cultural diversity, etc. – and the need to reclaim our time so we can better utilize them.

photo by Chris Kreussling aka Flatbush Gardener

Harvesting rainwater to mitigate Combined Sewer Overflow and promoting community composting to turn organic waste into nourishment for the city’s gardens and parks were just two of the ideas discussed on what Urban Permaculture might look like; both exemplify perfectly the Permaculture philosophy of turning problems into solutions. It is worth noting that these activities make sense financially as well as environmentally (homeowners, checked your water bill lately?) and are relatively simple to implement.

Sustainable Flatbush would like to give big big thanks to Joan and Wilton for coming back to the neighborhood to share their knowledge and experience with us!!

more photos from Event #3 can be seen at Flatbush Gardener’s Flickr gallery.

Stormwater Can Make the City More Sustainable.
Source control regards stormwater as a resource to be utilized for much broader sustainability purposes, rather than a waste that must be disposed. By giving life to vegetation, stormwater can help prepare the City for the effects of climate change, decrease summer temperatures, promote energy efficiency, improve air quality, and make communities more livable. A major commitment to source control would help advance a number of ambitious and laudable goals that Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the City to attain by the year 2030.

Imagine every building’s roof covered with vegetation, every city block lined with trees surrounded by plants and flowers, every apartment house using rainbarrel water for its garden… this is not a pipedream (no pun intended), it can be done for less money than the DEP’s unsustainable and less-effective proposals:

For $1,000 invested in the DEP’s end-of-pipe projects, CSOs might decrease by 2,400 gallons. By comparison, the same $1,000 investment in:

•Greenstreets could decrease CSOs by 14,800 gallons;
•Street trees could decrease CSOs by 13,170 gallons;
•New green roofs could decrease CSOs by 810 gallons; retrofitted green roofs could decrease CSOs by 865 gallons; and incentivized green roofs could decrease CSOs by 12,000 gallons; and
•Rain barrels could decrease CSOs by 9,000 gallons

You get the idea. The whole report is available here. Perhaps the most important force for change will be ordinary citizens educating ourselves about the CSO problem and its potential solutions, and letting our elected officials know what we want, as well as implementing ideas ourselves on the local level. How great would it be to see a rainbarrel in front of every home in Brooklyn?

S.W.I.M.
(Storm Water Infrastructure Matters)

PLaNYC2030: A Great Step Toward a Greener More Sustainable City, but Where’s the SWIMming?

New S.W.I.M.Coalition
Says, “Where’s the SWIMming in the City’s Long-Term Plan?”

Quick. Look out the window. Now. It’s raining, and, guess what? More sewage is being swept into our waterways. Yes, sewage. Again.

Just before Earth Day, as you’ll remember, our city was hit with a nasty and very unusual Spring Northeaster, socking us with torrential rain. And we also watched, just days ago, as a whale lost its bearings and swam into the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The Daily News named the whale “Sludgie,” and they did that for a reason. Many of our waterways, although generally improved in the last couple of decades, remain polluted. And one of the biggest sources of that pollution: CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflow).

Did you know that less than 1/10 of an inch of hard rain is all it takes for sewage to enter our waterways? So, can you imagine the sheer volume of sewage that is being swept into our waterways? This happens largely because we don’t capture enough of our storm water BEFORE it flows into our waterways through the CSOs.

Right on point, just this past Sunday, on Earth Day, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the city’s long-term plan called PlaNYC 2030. It’s the first time in a long time that any Mayor/NYC government has tried to envision what our city should look like in the coming decades. It’s a terrific plan that really should do a lot to give us a greener, less polluted, more sustainable city.

And we’re happy to report that much of the water quality action plan is directly in line with the S.W.I.M. platform, and includes many great measures. However, parts of the plan aren’t quite expansive enough e.g., planting only five storm water capture street trees and studying only those while tens of thousands of others are being planted, potentially missing broad opportunities for storm water capture.

While parts of the plan are modest, the plan does contain many S.W.I.M. platform items like creating an interagency task force that will address innovative storm water management techniques and creating a pilot program that includes swales (shallow troughlike depressions that carry water mainly during rainstorms or snow melts) along parkways, improving tree pit design and looking into mollusk habitats to improve water quality. The plan also calls for planting a million more street trees and creating at least 40 more greenstreets every season and designing them to absorb storm water, as well as new zoning regulations requiring storm water capture in parking lots and providing incentives for green roofs.

However, despite early mentions by the Mayor’s office that the water recreation goal would include swimming (he said that in an early press release), PlaNYC 2030 doesn’t mention achieving swimmability in any of the city’s waterways.

We think the bar is set too low and we ask, “Where’s the SWIMmability?”

While no one intends to actually swim in the shipping lanes on the East and Hudson Rivers, we firmly believe that 90% of our waterways can be swimmable by 2030. We can do that by making sure that all of the S.W.I.M. platform is adopted.

So, a word to Mayor Bloomberg: We want to work with you on water quality and, some day, when our waterways are again swimmable, we’ll all get together for a beach party.

In case you missed the storm water overflow, here’s a picture:

This is a picture of an overflowing CSO at Stuyvesant Cove (on the East River @ 23rd Street in Manhattan) caused by the recent northeaster. What you’re looking at is a mix of untreated storm water and sewage that’s pushed out into the water because the way we’ve built our city causes too much water to “run off.”

You can help us make this photo ancient history. You can help S.W.I.M. Feel free to post this photo and send it around the ‘net. Call, email or write your Councilmember and the Mayor and ask them to support the entire S.W.I.M. platform.

We are planning a large outdoor event for late Spring, and other events that may be “virtual” in nature. We hope you’ll join us.
Coalition Partners
Ashokan Services, Inc
Bronx Council for Environmental Quality
Bronx Initiative for Energy and the Environment
Bronx River Alliance
Cook + Fox Architects
The Downtown Boathouse
Eastern Queens Alliance
Full Spectrum
Friends of Brook Park
Friends of the High Line
The Gaia Institute
Gowanus Dredgers
Gowanus Oyster Garden Stewards
Green Apple Corps
Habana Labs
Long Island City Community Boathouse
Lower East Side Ecology Center
Manhattan Island Foundation
Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance
Mosholu Preservation Corporation
Mothers On the Move
Natural Resources Defense Council
Neighborhood Initiatives Development Corporation
New York City Soil and Water Conservation District
New York Harbor School
New York/New Jersey Baykeeper
New York Public Interest Research Group
New York Restoration Project
Newtown Creek Alliance
Nos Quedamos
Pratt Center for Community Development
The Redhook Boaters
Regional Plan Association
Riverkeeper
Rocking the Boat
Sebago Canoe Club
Solar 1
South Bronx Economic Development Corporation
Sustainable South Bronx
The Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy
Trees NY
Water Resources Group
Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice

For more information, contact: Marsha Gordon, LCG Communications: 718.853.5568; marshag@lcgcommunications.com