Washington, DC, Friday, September 15, 2017.  The national Sierra Club leadership honored Prince George’s Sierra Club Group Chair Martha Ainsworth with a Special Service Award at their annual meeting at the Washington Marriott Hotel.  The award honors Sierra Club members for their strong and consistent commitment to conservation or the Club over an extended period of time.  

            In presenting the award, Sierra Club President Loren Blackford, cited Ainsworth’s “outstanding leadership skills, sharp intellect, fierce tenacity, and organizational savvy on behalf of the Sierra Club in Maryland.”  As Chair of the Prince George’s Group since 2013, she moved immediately to increase the number of events and activities to re-engage existing members and attract new volunteers. 

            Blackford specifically praised Ainsworth’s analytic and survey skills in recruiting volunteers to conduct surveys of shoppers’ reusable bag use in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties and of the use of polystyrene foam and other types of disposable food containers by restaurants in Prince George’s County, to provide evidence in support of county environmental legislation.

            The shopper survey, which observed more than 17,000 grocery shoppers, showed the enormous impact of Montgomery County’s fee on disposable bags in reducing their use, compared with Prince George’s County, with no fee.  Two-thirds of Montgomery shoppers were avoiding the use of disposable bags, compared with only 12 percent of Prince George’s shoppers.

            The survey of foam food containers in restaurants found that while three-quarters had at least one foam food container, an even larger share were already using substitutes that were recyclable or compostable.  Prince George’s County adopted a ban on polystyrene foam food containers in 2015.  The Prince George’s Group continues to monitor the implementation of the foam ban county-wide.

            In support of the successful campaign by Sierra Club and other environmental organizations to ban hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of natural gas in Prince George’s County, Ainsworth documented the number of drinking water wells in South County that could potentially be contaminated by the process.  A year later, Maryland banned fracking state-wide amid concerns about its environmental impact.