Arts & Entertainment
Video: Turning Beach Trash into Art
After thousands of plastic disks escaped from a Mamaroneck N.Y. sewage treatment plant in March, local artists create a big fish using materials from collected from beach cleanup.
Three months after escaped from a sewage treatment across the Long Island Sound in Mamaroneck, N.Y., local artists unveiled a "big fish" constructed out of materials collected from the beach cleanup.
Artists Sally Shore and showcased their artwork at an event entitled "Reclaiming the Beach" on Sunday at the Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery at the Art League of Long Island in Dix Hills.
escaped in early March from the Westchester Wastewater Treatment Plant and littered area beaches, including Glen Cove's Crescent Beach.
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"I took a couple thousand of the disks off the beach to my studio," said Shore. "I started thinking of what I could do with them, and I originally planned to use them as room dividers. I tried a couple of different ways to attach them, and I ended up using 33 different kinds of ribbon and yarn. I just started tying them together. And at first, I thought it was neat if it looked one way at the top and one at the bottom. My intention was to make flowers on the top, but now you see the final product, with nearly 1,000 disks on it."
The disks – which are made with high density polyethylene – remove excess nitrogen from the water, helping prevent low-oxygen levels known as hypoxia – a problem the Sound has faced before. But these disks never began their filtering process, escaping when their holding tanks overflowed from heavy rains.
Find out what's happening in Glen Covewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“The plant was being upgraded at the time of the release, and these tanks were not fully operational when the release occurred,” said Caren Halbfinger, the Westchester Health Dept. Director overseeing the spill. “The disks are being isolated to keep this from recurring.”
Glen Head artist and social activist artist Karyo doesn't blame the technology, which is used all over the world; instead, she says the problem is that employees weren't trained to implement the use of the disks.
"The technology is actually a good one," said Karyo. "But we should learn how to use something before we actually try it out."
As Beach Captain for Tappan and Sea Cliff Beach, Karyo joined a team of volunteers brought together by the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor who collected over 20,000 disks in just one hour.
