Hooray for the towns of Southampton and East Hampton, Long Island for instituting bans on those single-use plastic bags that litter our landscape and impact wildlife. Birds get entangled in the bags, and sea life can mistake them for food and die from ingesting them. Now it's high time for all of New York to do the same right thing.
Majorities on both the town boards of Southampton and East Hampton in December 2014 voted to ban the distribution of the bags. For more than three years, there have been bans in the Villages of Southampton—the first municipality in the state to enact one—and East Hampton.
Other villages and towns on Long Island are now considering similar actions.
The Southampton Town ban will take effect on, appropriately, Earth Day, April 22. The East Hampton ban will kick in five months later.
“I’m hoping the other towns that have taken a wait-and-see approach to this will jump on board now,” says Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst. She believes a regional approach is important.
“I think everyone agrees that eliminating single-use plastic bags as a form of litter is an excellent goal, and working together to enact legislation on a regional basis provides an opportunity to achieve the greatest results and send a coordinated and non-partisan message about the measure’s environmental significance.”
East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said, “I think East Hampton and Southampton are making a statement that single-use plastic bags are bad for the environment, and at the same time I call on the county and the state to ban single-use plastic bags.”
The two towns, and earlier the villages, moved in the face of intense plastic industry lobbying and pressure—applied on Long Island, the state and across the nation.
As that advice to Dustin Hoffman’s character went in the 1967 movie, The Graduate went: “Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.”
What has that one word turned out to be? Mess. The award-winning 2013 documentary, “Plastic Paradise: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” exposes one big part of the mess: a vortex of plastic debris, covering an area as large as Texas, floating in the Pacific Ocean.
But the plastics industry, with its vested interest, keeps pushing plastic aggressively.
In 2011, the most recent move on the Suffolk County government level seeking to discourage the use of single-use plastic bags failed as resolutions authored by then Legislator Vivian Viloria-Fisher of East Setauket got nowhere after intense industry lobbying.
Meanwhile, despite Ms. Throne-Holst’s hope for a “non-partisan message,” in Southampton and East Hampton politics played a role. In Southampton, the town board vote was 3-2. Throne-Holst and Brad Bender, Independence Party members who run with Democratic Party cross-endorsement, voted for the ban; its two Republican members balloted against it. GOPer Christine Scalera said, “I believe the ban to be overreaching government.”
Councilman Bender spoke about the plastic bags’ littering his home hamlet of Northampton, of its “being a big problem.” You don’t have to go to the Pacific to see a mess plastics have made. “We can help clean up this community by banning these. I’ve never seen a paper bag stuck in a tree, but I’ve seen plenty of plastic bags stuck in trees,” he said. “This also keeps them out of the stomachs of wildlife and fish.”
In East Hampton the vote was 4-1 with that town board’s lone Republican, Fred Overton, voting against.
If the GOP thinks there’s an advantage in opposing a ban on the single-use plastic bags, it should think again. The initiative—on Long Island and elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world—largely involves strong grassroots action.
“The whole movement is really a bottom-up movement,” said Dieter von Lehsten, co-chair of Sustainable Southampton Green Advisory Committee, at an East Hampton town board meeting as he supported joint action. It “will give a big impetus for Suffolk County,” and possibly New York City, too, he said.
Considering the positions being taken by the new heavily GOP-dominated Congress in its first weeks, being staunchly anti-environmental might be what the party wants. If so, watch the pendulum swing back again.
Journalist and Sierran Karl Grossman is a member of the Long Island Group and professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He is the author of six books and his investigative reporting appears regularly online at CounterPunch, the Huffington Post and other sites. For nearly 25 years, he has hosted a nationally-aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up.