Tons of Brooklyn Trash Will Be Trucked To New Gowanus Site
North Brooklyn households produce 780 tons of garbage daily!
Currently, a fleet of trucks picks up 1,600 tons of trash each day around the borough and delivers it to various private “land-based transfer stations” located mainly in north Brooklyn (Bushwick, Greenpoint, Williamsburg), where it festers and waits to be carted off to a landfill.
Starting in the fall, the trucks will begin moving the trash heaps to a new marine transfer station located at 500 Hamilton Avenue on the Gowanus waterfront where the garbage will be loaded onto barges and shipped to a facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. From there, the trash will be brought to a rail yard to be transported to disposal facilities in either Virginia or upstate New York.
The new Gowanus transfer station will cut the number of trucks carting trash through the city by 200 per day, according to a NYC Department of Sanitation statement released on Tuesday, and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by waste transport by more than 34,000 tons annually.
The new plan will also relieve neighborhoods burdened by the pollution, traffic, and stink of the “waste processing infrastructure,” including North Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Southeast Queens.
Plans to open an additional Southwest Brooklyn marine transfer station at Gravesend Bay next year will “further redistribute the burden of waste,” the Department of Sanitation says.
