1,600 Tons Of City Trash Will Soon Be Trucked To The Gowanus Waterfront Each Day

GOWANUS, BROOKLYN — By fall of this year, the 1,600 tons of household garbage currently trucked each day from Brooklyn's curbside trash cans to more than a dozen noisy, smelly, landlocked facilities — most of them concentrated in North Brooklyn, much to the chagrin of neighbors — will instead be trucked to the Gowanus waterfront.

Once the garbage arrives in Gowanus, it will then be packed into giant shipping containers and ferried to New Jersey on sea barges.

This new system will help "dramatically reduce truck traffic associated with waste collection and hauling in neighborhoods historically overburdened by waste processing infrastructure," NYC Department of Sanitation officials said Tuesday in a celebratory press release.

Currently, around 200 city garbage trucks haul these 1,600 daily tons of residential trash to landlocked processing centers throughout Brooklyn — mainly in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick. (One local environmental org, Newtown Creek Alliance, has counted 19 trash centers in North Brooklyn — "the densest concentration of waste transfer stations in New York City," processing 40 percent of all city garbage, the org says.)

Once it's unloaded, the trash sits and stews and drives neighbors crazy until another fleet of garbage trucks shows up to re-load it, drive it through city streets and eventually dump it in landfills outside NYC.

Come fall 2017, all that will change. Under the city's new plan, much of the trash currently plaguing North Brooklyn will instead be trucked directly to a new "marine transfer station" at 500 Hamilton Ave., situated beneath the Gowanus Expressway at the mouth of the Gowanus Canal (see Google Maps image below). The trash will then be loaded onto barges and shipped to Jersey — cutting out the second wave of trucks altogether.

And by sometime next year, the city says it will open another marine transfer station further south, in Gravesend Bay — taking some of the burden off Gowanus.

Together, these two seaside facilities are slated to take in more than a tenth of the city's 12,000 daily tons of household waste.

Here's what our 20-year, $3.3 billion contract with Waste Management, the company in charge of carrying out the plan, will buy us, according to the Department of Sanitation:

"Waste Management will accept sealed waste containers from the Department of Sanitation at the Hamilton Avenue and Southwest Brooklyn marine transfer stations. Cranes will load the containers onto barges, which will be transported to a Waste Management-owned intermodal facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. From there, containers will be transported to a rail yard, where they will be loaded onto rail cars for transport to their final destinations. The contract includes disposal facilities in Virginia and upstate New York."

Neighbors and elected officials down in Gravesend, however, have come out in fierce opposition of the city's plan to build a new trash facility along their waterfront. They've been worried the construction will dredge up long-buried poisons in the ground, which will then contaminate the bay — worries that were proven at least partially founded last month, when dredged-up soil at the site reportedly tested positive for toxic levels of dioxins, lead, mercury, chlordanes and a banned insecticide called Mirex. You can read more about that neighborhood battle over at Bklyner.

The city's plan for Gowanus has gone over more smoothly.

Although neighbors were initially afraid that trucking 1,600 daily tons of garbage to 500 Hamilton Ave. would, in the words of one local blogger, cause "a very ripe and funky smell indeed" to "waft through parts of Gowanus and up to the people stuck in traffic on the Expressway" — perhaps even plaguing next-door South Slope, Sunset Park and Red Hook — city officials say the setup of Gowanus' new state-of-the-art facility will ensure the mountains of rubbish barely touch open air.

Here's a cool step-by-step on how the trash will be transferred from truck to crane to barge.

"I personally live on 14th Street, just three blocks from the Hamilton Avenue facility," Leah Archibald, director of EVERGREEN, an org that looks out for the interests of manufacturing businesses in North Brooklyn, said in a statement. "I am confident that their operations will provide minimal impact on the local residential community."

And more importantly, advocates of the new system say, the "overburdened" and "underserved" communities in North Brooklyn who've long shouldered more than their fair share of city trash will finally get some relief.

A note: As we understand it, this plan won't completely eliminate the garbage problem in North Brooklyn, seeing as existing waste transfer facilities will still be handling commercial trash collection (as opposed to residential trash collection, which is in the city's hands). We're not clear, though, on how much commercial garbage will still be flowing through the area. We've reached out to the Department of Sanitation for clarification, and will update this post if and when we hear back.

But these changes should at least be enough to help Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick residents boxed in by trash centers breathe a little easier — maybe even get a whiff of fresh air every now and again.

“North Brooklyn has long been burdened with noxious fumes and high numbers of trucks traversing to and fro," New York State Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, representing Williamsburg and Greenpoint, said Tuesday.

"The introduction of the Hamilton Avenue and Southwest Brooklyn marine transfer stations will provide my district with much relief," the assemblyman said. "We have supported New York City’s waste for decades and I am know my constituents will be happy knowing that 100 less trucks will be traveling in their neighborhood."

Thoughts on the city's plans for Gowanus? Reach out: simone.wilson@patch.com.

Lead photo via DSNY/Flickr