They removed over 2 tons of trash. But there's so much more on Burlington Island
Robert Catalano is an avid boater and a committed environmentalist.
But, even he was shocked the first time he saw the condition of Burlington Island in the Delaware River.
“I've never seen so many plastic bottles in one place,” he said.
That was in 2022. Since then, he has captained an effort to cleanup the island. Through the nonprofit Spearhead Project Earth, volunteers have cleaned up miles of shoreline and acres of land, removing over 4,500 pounds of plastic waste on Burlington Island.
While the work began last year, crews returned April 1 for their 2023 effort and will continue to work until the end of October.
Every Thursday volunteers commit three to four hours to the island.
They head out on a boat and do about an hour of clean up, get an education from team members about the harmful effects single use plastics, eat lunch, and then head back to land on the boat.
At first glance the island's conditions are not noticeable. As you go deeper into the island's greenery passing tall grass, broken branches, and avoiding spiders and other insects along the way, the dire conditions of Burlington Island become more evident.
The areas that have yet to be cleaned up by Spearhead are covered in waste. The tide has pushed broken glass and aluminum cans further into the island. The six volunteers on a trip on Aug. 10 avoided sharp objects by using the "grabby thing" tool and pointed out tires, an old model washing machine, beer cans that were left from the 80's, and pieces from a toy jeep.
They said they even found a refrigerator at a previous cleanup.
Volunteer Justin Brown takes time on this visit to informs volunteers about single use plastic and the harm it causes. He said that the production of single use plastic is very energy intensive and creates CO2 and methane, but also requires the use of a lot of fossil fuels.
"In fact, it is estimated that the production of single use plastics by 2050 will account for about 20% of the world's total oil consumption," said Brown on a recent Thursday cleanup.
After a cleanup recently someone asked Catalano, “oh, you guys must be done, that’s a lot, right?” He said people are noticing a difference on the shoreline but, “we are not done, we are very far from done.”
There is still a lot of waste hidden on the four miles of shoreline that the group will have to cut through vegetation to get to.
“I’m sure there is tons more plastic on the island that people just can’t see,” said Catalano.
Catalano is committed to the cause and the longterm cleanup.
He co-owns the Spearhead Group in Yardley with his wife where the global packing company makes the purple bags for Crown Royal Whiskey. Catalano understands that a lot of packaging gets thrown out or ends up as waste, and he and his wife have made a commitment to make sustainable packaging and to eliminate waste.
After witnessing the drastic conditions of Burlington Island Catalano felt that “as a commitment as a company this would be a really cool concept to try and develop a nonprofit foundation that goes right to our own core values as a company.”
He is joined by his sons, Aidan and Quinn, on the volunteer trips every Thursday.
What is Burlington Island?
Burlington Island, roughly 396 acres with a 100-acre lake in the center resulting from sand mining, sits in between Bristol in Bucks County and Burlington City in New Jersey. It has long suffered the effects of its location and decades of what many have said is human abuse and neglect.
In 1623, settlers moved in and began to disturb the island inhabited by the Lenni Lenape people, who referred to the island as Mattenecunk. Catalano said the Lenni Lenape tribe, blessed Spearhead Project Earth and had a ceremony on the island.
Burlington Island hasn’t been inhabited since 1976 when the last several homes were knocked down, and the island is no longer easily accessible to the general public. A permit and permission is needed to visit.
The island was also once an amusement park where guests could ride over by ferry. Pieces of the fomer homes and park rides were left on the island and over the years home appliances and car scraps have been removed. Pieces of the amusement park's bathhouse still remain.
Frequent volunteer Jarred Colligon said the pillars left behind from rollercoasters in the middle of the 100-acre man-made lake are still visible.
Up until last year when Spearhead Project Earth began their hard work, the island remained quiet with very little activity and no active, regular cleanup effort. The island stood helpless as trash continued to wash onto the shore and create even worse conditions on the island, Catalano and others have said.
He said the group that owns the island, the Board of Island Managers, hopes to one day open the island up as a park, but no plans are in place for that now.
In the meantime, Spearhead volunteers have continued to cut out walking trails throughout the island.
"It's a really beautiful sight and a lot of people don't have access to it," Catalano said.
Cleanup and Field Research continues on Burlington Island
While volunteers have removed tons of waste, they are in a constant battle to keep the island clean as plastic returns and continues to wash on shore.
“We knew that it would be a commitment, and we're going to be doing it every year nonstop, because one of the things that we've discovered is some of the areas that we've cleaned have already had plastic returning to it,” said Catalano.
Since the project began in 2022, the group has experimented with different ways to pick up waste, including reusable bags to collect the garbage. They have also set up a recycling bin dedicated to Spearhead Project Earth where they bring all the plastic, keeping it out of the landfills and dumps, and instead bringing it to the recycling stream.
Spearhead Project Earth is also working with the educational group Seagram at Penn State University to conduct field research. They are tracking with GPS coordinates and measuring the weights of every clean up.
Catalano said that the island is acting like a "liver of the river" as it is collecting the toxic plastic.
He said that if their research proves that waste keeps returning to the same locations, then they can possibly come up with methods to collect it.
Catalano explained that plastics create microplastics that end up in our water and harm humans, sea life, and the environment.
“In fact, it's been found that we consume up to a credit card of plastic a week in our water, and it's due to microplastics,” he said. Plastic takes 400 to 1,000 years to break down into small microparticles not visible to the human eye. These microplastics end up in our food and water.
Volunteers work through wild summer weather on Burlington Island
The work of the volunteers has not been without challenges this summer as Bucks County has experienced extreme heat, serious floods, and terrible air quality as a result of the wildfires in Canada.
Catalano said that the recent extreme flooding created problems on the river. Huge logs, that they call Delaware torpedoes, form in the river creating dangerous conditions. He said that most boaters can’t even go out, but Spearhead Project Earth has navigated the situation, so it doesn't interfere with their trips to Burlington Island.
Volunteers have pushed through and gone out in 95-degree heat too.
“Some volunteers have dropped off and not come out, but we do have some really hardcore serious volunteers that are coming out in extreme heat,” said Catalano.
Brown emphasizes the importance of every single person or volunteer that is working to make a difference.
"A lot of people assume that they're just one person and that if they do something small it doesn't have a huge impact," Brown said. "That will cause a lot of people to not even make the attempt to try.
"If everybody thinks like that then that's hundreds of millions of people who are all choosing to not do something, but instead if you have hundreds of millions of people who do something small that ultimately will add up over time and create very big changes."
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Burlington Island clean up continues in Delaware River
