Save The Great South Bay is pleased to announce that York Analytical Laboratories is now a major benefactor of Save The Great South Bay.  York is a family-operated environmental testing laboratory of contaminants in water, soil and air, and has served Long Island and the greater NYC area for more than 30 years.

Their expertise and capabilities for dealing with our region’s most pressing environmental issues will accelerate and advance the efforts of Save The Great South Bay. The bay and our local environment will only improve to the extent that we can have accurate measurements of the problems we face — nitrogen levels in our water, heavy metals in our soil, recently identified suspected carcinogens such as 1, 4-Dioxane, a common ingredient in household products, and PFOA / PFOS, which is a drinking water contaminant of emerging concern.

As Save The Great South Bay seeks to implement strategies to improve the health of the bay through native plantings along the 36 creeks that flow into the bay via its Creek Defender Program, and through it’s Bay Friendly Yards initiative, which similarly advocates native plantings as a means of improving water quality, we will need regular data that will measure the effectiveness of our efforts.   Further, addressing the bay’s problems will be impossible if we can’t identify the sources of the pollutants coming into the bay.

The more we study environmental contaminants and their effects, the more we realize how much more we need to learn.    What substances should we be looking at?  At what concentrations should we be concerned?   How are these substances interacting in our air, water, and soil?    There have been so far 254 Superfund Clean Up sites on Long Island (State and Federal).   What is the continued legacy of that?   How does the use of pesticides like RoundUp or Suffolk County’s use of methoprene for mosquito spraying or our use of lawn fertilizers, or road run off affect the bay and our local ecology?   York Lab can help Save The Great South Bay answer such questions.   It is making the necessary equipment investments so that we can improve our data.

York Analytical Laboratories’ involvement with Save The Great South Bay has much to do with their CEO Michael Beckerich, and his passion for the bay and for our local environment.   He knows full well how unique Long Island’s ecology is, and what putting it under threat.   Expect to see York Lab featured at our events, and to see Michael and his colleagues pitching in to help the bay this year and in the years to come.

“We are very excited to be able to join the team at Save The Great South Bay. With the opening of York Labs’ new Emerging Contaminants Laboratory in Queens and continued focus on providing fast and accurate sample analyses for Long Island’s environmental community, we are very happy to be in a position to help our friends at Save The Great South Bay and the communities they serve,” said Michael J. Beckerich, CEO and President of York Analytical Laboratories. “The Long Island environmental professional community is very strong and very focussed on local issues, of which there are many.”