Culture
Stark and Colorful Images of NYC's Debris
Peek inside the sprawling facility that handles tons of NYC’s plastic and glass.
The 11-acre Sims Municipal Recycling facility sits on a former NYPD impoundment lot on the Brooklyn waterfront. Barges slosh to a stop at the city-owned pier in the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. Each day, they unload as many as 450 tons of recycled materials collected by the Department of Sanitation.
Crushed glass and shattered rock from the construction of the 2nd Avenue subway were aggregated into a coarse building material to raise the facility an additional four feet as a preventative measure against storm surges. “They’re low-cost materials that are generated locally,” Tom Outerbridge, the facility’s manager, explained to CityLab.