On 1/19/17 we (Ruthanne, Ruby, and Lindsay) interviewed Kaitlyn Parkins. She is the education director of the L.E.S.E.C. and works on the stewardship programs. This organization has four different programs including electronic waste recycling, and are a host site for the NYC compost project. The electronic recycling is held in their Gowanus office. They collect electronic waste from NY citizens and hold events where people can drop off their e-waste. They will recycle it or refurbish it in their office in order to keep e-waste out of the waste stream. The NYC compost project has a host site in each borough and they work on community based composting, composting education, and work with community gardens and have a big composting facility for their downtown park. They make compost from food scraps and distribute it back to New Yorker’s. The L.E.S.E.C. goes into schools or has schools come to this Center and holds community based workshops to get people to realize how important water is and what they can do to help. In the education center they have tanks of water from the East River and fish and other organisms from the East River living in them. This organization also looks at what the water used to look like and what it looks like right now. They also look at what our land uses and how we’ve effected our waterways and how they’ve effected us. A popular project that they have is their catch and release fishing clinic. All summer they have free fishing clinics where people learn how to fish. They look at laws and such that focus on how plastic is used and about ecology and pollution. Another thing they know about is fisherman and how fishing lines are often caught or discarded in the river and they’re a major issue. They teach about combined sewage overflow and do stewardship events in the park to plant more plants and install green infrastructure like bio-soils and other things to help manage stormwater in order to keep combined sewer overflow events from happening. A really interesting thing that we got a brief description on is that humans aren’t actually effected by fish eating plastic because when we cook fish the plastic will be taken out if the fish haven’t disposed of it already. It mostly just effects fish because it can choke them to death, or harm them in some unnatural way and make them go belly up. What effects humans is mostly just mercury, and PCB’s that have health effects on humans. What does effect both fish/organisms AND humans is that when fish die earlier than they would have if plastic wan’t in our water, our ecosystem goes off balance and we are loosing pieces of our ecosystem. Their actual plan is to make and put up fishing line recycling containers in the park to give fisherman a place to put their fishing line so it can be discarded and recycled properly. Kaitlyn mentioned at the end that as long as the goal you want people to follow is ‘easy enough’ than they will follow it. Although this interview was short it was very educational and I think that I learned a lot as well as my group members. I would love to learn more from the L.E.S.E.C. and hopefully do a fieldwork with them at some point.
