Fifth Avenue Committee Executive Director Michele de la Uz

For better and worse, Brooklyn has not entirely shed its past as an industrial center. On the one hand, there’s a growing number of new manufacturing firms in the borough. On the other, there are sites around Kings County still stained by the polluting industrial companies that used to operate there. In 2010, two of those sites—the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek—were designated Superfund sites by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Four years later, the former Wolff-Alport Chemical Company on the Brooklyn-Queens border was added to the program.

Wednesday’s edition of BkLive on BRIC-TV took stock of where New York City’s three Superfund sites stand. Professor Zhongqi Cheng, director of the Environmental Sciences Analytical Center at Brooklyn College, Fifth Avenue Committee Executive Director Michele de la Uz, and Willis Elkins, an artist and member of the Newtown Creek Alliance joined me. Watch it:

For information about the three sites, click on these:
Gowanus Canal
Newtown Creek
Wolff-Alport