A cleanup on the edge of Bucks County is bringing back one of the areas’s most beautiful spots, a once-pristine piece of nature. Zack Boyd wrote about the cleanup efforts in the Bucks County Courier Times.

After decades of human abuse and another 50 years of being left mostly alone, the cleanup of Burlington Island, which sits in the Delaware River between Bristol and Burlington City, has finally started.

The large island that spans roughly 396 acres and includes a 100-acre lake was used by the Lenni Lenape people for thousands of years. Sadly the tribe’s sacred sites were disturbed by settlers who arrived in 1623.

The island was also home to an amusement park that burned down in the 1920s and long-forgotten mid-century vacation homes. The island’s interior is marred by discarded bicycles and cars and other piles of rusting scrap. It has been uninhabited since 1976.

Cleanup efforts began in 2019 when United by Blue removed more than 96,000 pounds of metal from the island.

Now, Robert Catalano, cofounder of the Spearhead Group, has decided to start a new initiative that would fund volunteer cleanup of plastics on the island. Spearhead Project Earth will bring volunteers to the island to clean it up while being educated about its history and ecology.

Read more about Burlington Island in the Bucks County Courier Times.