Gothamist77%
Meet the mussels doing the dirty work of cleaning up Newtown Creek 11%
By Walter Wuthmann0%
7/5/2026, 12:00:49 PM
Keywords: Mussels, Newtown Creek, Water Quality, Restoration, Environmentalism, New York City, Brooklyn, Greenpoint
BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Overconfidence Bias, and Framing Effect, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 20.6% saturation with 147 hits. Analysis detected 690 faulty-reasoning hits from 713 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 27.9% and a BS Rank of 11% (19,527 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 89.20% of the article peer group.
TINA, a new resident of industrial north Greenpoint, has a shock of green hair and a belly full of shellfish.
She spends her days cleaning the polluted waters of Newtown Creek, the federal Superfund site dividing Brooklyn and Queens.
TINA is a 600-gallon fiberglass tank full of ribbed mussels and marsh grass built by the Newtown Creek Alliance, an environmental non-profit.
The name is an abbreviation of Spartina, the scientific name of the marsh grass.
“Trying to create a real salt marsh is our ultimate goal,” Newtown Creek Alliance Executive Director Willis Elkins said in an interview.
“But there's limited places we can do that, and it takes a very long time and a lot of work to make that happen.”
Salt marshes are critical ecosystems where hardy grasses give mussels and other invertebrates cover to do the dirty job of filtering water between the tides.
Pressed for space between scrap yards and high-rise condos, the group decided to create a salt marsh in miniature that sits on one of the creek’s concrete embankments.
“[We’re] bringing the creek water onto the shoreline,” Elkins said.
The Newtown Creek Alliance hopes the TINA tank can make a small dent in cleaning up one of the most polluted waterways in the country.
If successful, the alliance leaders imagine other non-profit organizations and government agencies could deploy their own tanks on the banks of polluted waterways across the city.
The Newtown Creek was once a thriving tidal estuary lined with salt marsh cord grass and massive banks of mussels.
But by the 1800s the creek had become one of the busiest industrial areas in the city, lined with oil refineries, petrochemical plants, glue factories, sawmills and coal yards.
Marsh grasses give mussels cover from predators.
The creek is now designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as a federal Superfund site and the target of a quarter-billion dollar clean-up.
TINA is a pilot project meant to supplement that restoration.
The Newtown Creek Alliance first deployed TINA this summer after receiving $12,000 as part of a Con Edison resiliency grant.
At high tide, the tank fills with dirty water pumped up from the creek.
The mussels filter the water and the tank discharges at low tide.
“ There's a measurable difference when the water's coming into the tank versus when it's coming out,” said Gus Perry, restoration and marine projects coordinator for the alliance.
“We'll see green, cloudy, plankton-rich waters coming in, and then nice clear water on the way out.”
The salt marsh grasses provide shelter for the roughly 500 mussels within from predators like gulls and raccoons.
The bivalves then filter things like heavy metals and bacteria out of the water.
TINA is not only cleaning the water, but giving the mussels a safe environment to grow and multiply.
“ It's a very interesting approach,” said Stony Brook University Aquatic Ecology Professor Diana Padilla, who’s not affiliated with the project.
While the actual volume of water the TINA tank filters is “pretty small,” Padilla said, “ it does bring attention to people of the potential power of these animals to clean up that water.”
Perry thinks TINA’s low installation and maintenance costs makes it an easily replicable restoration tool.
Mussels filter polluted Newtown Creek water.
“ This is something that we'd love to see the city pick up on a bigger scale,” Perry said.
A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection said it is experimenting with its own mussel installation projects in Jamaica Bay.
The city found that ribbed mussels reduced waterborne pathogens there by at least 10 percent.
“We appreciate the Newtown Creek Alliance’s dedication to creating cleaner water for New Yorkers, and DEP will continue testing and developing new ideas to help reach that shared goal,” Press Secretary Déja Stewart said in a statement.
The Newtown Creek Alliance plans to break down the TINA tank for the winter.
The group will return the mussels back to the creek – where they’ll keep filtering the water with each passing tide.
“ These organisms that have been here for thousands and thousands of years, they can do that work,” Elkins said.
“They just need a little bit of help from us.”
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100%flagged-word coverageDiana Padilla
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