While April marks the month containing Earth Day, the Central Park Conservancy celebrates Earth Day every day in New York’s 843 acre park.
The heart and lungs of the city, the park’s 24 thousand trees is key to the vitality of a metropolis that is the most densely populated place in the United States, boasting over 8.3 million people. While the most recent Earth Day — designated to bring awareness of the environment to the world — celebrates its 40th anniversary, New York’s conservancy has been at work greening the city for thirty years. Visitors to the park today will note the efforts, especially since 2007, three years ago, when an in-Park recycling program was launched.
Walk out from a great suite nearby and into Central Park, and you’ll find around a hundred blue bins earmarked for recycling bottles and cans. As the spring and summer continues, the conservancy will more than double this number as the program grows to include paper — from magazines to newspapers — bringing the total of the blue bins to 236 by the end of 2010. In the last three years, the park has collected over ten thousand pounds of plastic, nearly 200,000 pounds of scrap metal, 220 tires, 660 gallons of motor oil and 230 oil filters, not to mention 700 cubic yards of cans and bottles.
The conservancy, charged with maintaining the park’s trees, lakes, and wildlife, also recently held a tree inventory that used GPS tech to find and record the age, size, height and species of every tree that’s bigger than six inches in diameter, allowing the tree care crew to track such blights as Dutch Elm Disease and to find new places to plant, allowing the thousands of trees to absorb New York’s carbon dioxide and other pollutants and to give back fresh oxygen. You may not see all the work behind the scenes as you stroll through Central Park by the Azalea Pond or as you watch birds at Bank Rock Bay, but they’re there, ensuring the park will be maintained far into the future.
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