Communities
Raptors in Our Backyard: The Biodiversity of New Jersey’s Wetlands
7/9/2021
Since 2014 our team at Samsung Electronics America in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey has partnered with Hackensack Riverkeeper, an organization dedicated to cleaning up and protecting our local waterways and their surroundings. Here’s why.
Overpeck Creek is a stretch of shallow water flanked by tall reeds and leafy maple trees. Around the northern edge of the creek are over 800 acres of sports fields, playgrounds, and green grass known as Overpeck County Park. On the southern edge of the creek one can find our Samsung Electronics America North American headquarters – a blue and white glass building where over a thousand of our employees work.
Overpeck Creek, our backyard and the beautiful view from many of our conference rooms, is an 8-mile long tributary of the 50-mile Hackensack River. The greater 197-mile Hackensack River Watershed spreads throughout all of northeast New Jersey.
The Hackensack River, until very recently, was one of the most polluted waterways in America.
“For years people thought that the Hackensack River was a handy little disposal site,” says Captain Bill Sheehan, founder of Hackensack Riverkeeper, a celebrated non-profit that has been stewarding the protection of the New Jersey Meadowlands (the large ecosystem of wetlands also known as the Hackensack Meadowlands) for over two decades. “Companies up and down the river would use it to dump their waste.”