Open House New York invites you to take a cruise along Newtown Creek, the 3.5-mile tributary that separates Brooklyn and Queens, to explore the outsized role that this historic waterway plays in New York’s waste system.

The neighborhoods surrounding Newtown Creek are home to nineteen waste transfer stations, the buildings where garbage is collected and aggregated before being sent to its final destination. This is the densest collection of these facilities anywhere in the city and collectively, the waste transfer stations around and along Newtown Creek handle almost 40% of the waste that moves through New York.

Join Mitch Waxman and Willis Elkins of the Newtown Creek Alliance to learn about the ongoing efforts to address the environmental burden that this “clustering” has caused in the residential communities that surround the creek and some of the innovative work being done to develop new ways of recycling and reusing the challenging materials that pass through these facilities, from aggregates to porcelain.

AIA CES: 1.5 LU | HSW

This program is part of Getting to Zero: New York + Waste, a year-long series of tours and talks exploring New York City’s waste system.