County Bag Ban Proposed
East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell has suggested a countywide ban on disposable plastic shopping bags.
Mr. Cantwell said he had proposed the idea at a recent meeting of the East End Supervisors and Mayors Association. “That is a more comprehensive way to do it,” he said. “I’m hoping that the supervisors are going to support that request to the county.”
The East Hampton Village Board voted in 2011 to outlaw the bags, which are blamed for wildlife deaths, require petroleum to manufacture, and release toxins into soil and waterways as they decompose. Southampton Village prohibited them in 2013.
The East Hampton Town Litter Committee is preparing to launch a lobbying effort in support of a ban, East Hampton Town Trustee Debbie Klughers, a member of the committee, said.
Mr. Cantwell this week also called the quantity of roadside litter “troubling” in East Hampton Town.
The town’s Highway Department, he said, “does a very respectable job. The state and county do a much poorer job of keeping the sides of their roads clean.”
A result of budget cuts to the county roads program and the state’s Department of Transportation, “those efforts are deplorable compared to 20 years ago,” he said. “The burden falls on everyone else.”
On LTV
“Cleaning the Sands of Time,” a film depicting the Feb. 22 beach cleanup organized by Dell Cullum, a nature photographer and wildlife specialist, is airing on LTV. The 28-minute film chronicles the day on which 84 volunteers collected and removed 3,510 pounds of mixed debris from the ocean shoreline from Montauk Point to Georgica Beach in East Hampton Village.
“It’s a really good message,” Mr. Cullum said. “We’re anxious to get it out there so the summer people can see how hard we worked prior to the summer, and give them an idea of what we’re trying to do here and how they can help — by not littering, bringing out what they bring in, picking up after their dogs. The simple things that everybody is neglecting.”
It will be broadcast tonight at 6:30 and 11 more times through July 7. It will appear with Mr. Cullum’s “Imagination Nature,” a program that recently debuted on LTV in which he discusses wildlife and nature. Each episode features “Trash Talk,” a segment in which an individual or group delivers a message about keeping the town free of litter.
“Dell is raising awareness to get people to stop littering,” Mr. Cantwell said. He is also raising the awareness of government to stay on top of garbage removal from receptacles, he said.
Mr. Cantwell “has done a lot for the cause,” Mr. Cullum said. “Even though there’s more to do, if he can do it, he’s going to do it.”
“Every single person is responsible to not litter,” Ms. Klughers said. “It’s so simple: Bring it home with you, find a garbage can.” One of her concerns is road-end dumping, people leaving household garbage in or around receptacles at the roadway endings at public beaches.
“Dell sees the same people every morning. The rest of the residents are paying for their trash removal,” she said.
The town, Mr. Cantwell said, “has got to keep doing a better and better job of providing the facilities and doing all it can to pick up the trash that is left, in some cases left legitimately. Maybe we’re not picking it up as frequently as we should, although this year we’ve increased our schedule of pickups,” he said.