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The recycling canisters will have stickers in Spanish and English explaining what they are for.
Debbie Klughers with a recycling canister similar to one that she hopes will be placed at the town dock at Gann Road.
Debbie Klughers is a woman on a mission to protect the earth. Whether she’s petitioning the East Hampton Town Board to keep water balloons out of the water during Montauk’s Blessing of the Fleet, encouraging the town to do more recycling or hosting her “Keeping It Green” television show on LTV, her passion for the environment extends to nearly everything she does.
Back in April, Ms. Klughers showed up at a Town Board meeting with a large contraption made of white PVC plumbing pipe. It looked like a cartoon periscope. Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, a sport fisherman, knew what it was, but many people were stumped.
The device was a receptacle for used fishing line, which not only litters the East End’s beaches, but can strangle and mutilate shore birds and sea animals, and can tangle and jam boat propellers as well.
“BoatUS has 1,200 of these across the country. I’ve seen them for years in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida,” said Ms. Klughers this week.
Ms. Klughers made an offer to the board: if it would agree to ship the fishing line back to Berkley, a fishing line company that runs a large recycling program, she would make as many receptacles as the town needed to keep at road ends and would hang them at fishing areas.
It was an offer the board couldn’t refuse. It jumped on the plan and the Town Parks Department agreed to hang the containers. Councilwoman Julia Prince gave Ms. Klughers a list of 26 sites to put the receptacles.
Ms. Klughers has spent the past two months raising $1,500 with the help of a matching grant from the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation and has ordered enough PVC for 30 receptacles, and plans in the upcoming weeks to invite members of the community to help assemble them on her television show.
Ms. Klughers, who grew up on the South Fork and was this year’s valedictorian at Stony Brook University, where she majored in Environmental Studies, has had a show on LTV since October.
“I’ve always cared about environment and been a part of it, maybe I’ve always been an environmentalist,” she said. “The recycling rage has gone down since the ’70s, but maybe things like this will make people think about recycling in general.”
“The bigger picture is not only the fishing line, but to make people think,” she added. “There’s a lot of things this town needs to do to enhance their municipal solid waste program. Slowly, I’m going to bring it to them.”
