Essential Pollutors: Staten Island’s Sawmill Creek

Essential Pollutors: Staten Island’s Sawmill Creek

The former wetland margins of Staten Island at the Arthur Kill have undergone a variety of transformations and disturbances—from a nineteenth century industrial linoleum factory, to a contaminated wasteland, to a garbage dump, to a global retail fulfillment center epicenter. Today, Saw Mill Creek Marsh is an active wetland mitigation site, located just south of the massive Amazon fulfillment centers at Global Matrix Logistics. But the marsh is sandwiched between critical construction industries on either side. These “essential pollutors” produce concrete and hot mix asphalt, materials necessary for the development of road and highway infrastructure projects that stimulate the economy. The production of these materials creates contaminant waste that seeps into the surrounding wetland, affecting the overall health of this fragile landscape. This project proposes the use of green infrastructure and level spreaders to effectively manage the industrial waste runoff on site, by capturing coarser aggregate, slowing runoff velocity, and filtering runoff across broad expanses of vegetation before it reaches the wetlands and waterways. The upland wooded areas nearest to the industrial sites are comprised of plant species that tolerate the runoff laced with calcium carbonate, forming a new alkaline buffer forest.