Proposed Southampton Town Plastic Bag Ban Comes Up Empty

Members of an advisory committee implored Southampton Town Board members this week to again take up legislation that would ban the use of plastic grocery bags at supermarkets in the municipality.

Despite the strident urging, the Town Board appears split on the idea of a townwide ban on the grocery bags, with a majority opposing its imposition.

In a letter to town lawmakers, the Southampton Town Solid Waste Advisory Committee claimed that a public outreach effort begun two years ago, when the town last considered the idea of banning the utilization of such bags, has had little overall impact, and that some 20 million of the bags end up in landfills or as litter each year, from Southampton Town alone.

“Despite an active program, in operation more than two years, to educate the public and provide sites for the collection and recycling of these bags, less than 10 percent of those bags are collected,” the committee’s chairs, John DiStefano and Lucille Dunne, wrote in the letter to the Town Board. “That means that 20,000,000 of those bags enter our waste stream or litter our highways, streets, roads, parks, and obscenely wave at us when caught in trees.”

A ban proposed in recent years never gained traction at Town Hall, in part because a Republican-led majority had opposed it. This time around, the split crosses party lines—with the deciding vote against apparently being Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst, who had supported the ban the first time it came up three years earlier.

Democratic Councilwoman Bridget Fleming and Councilman Brad Bender, an Independence Party member, both said they were in favor of a ban, but lamented the fact that there does not appear to be enough support among their colleagues, so they have no immediate plans to introduce new legislation calling for a bag ban.

“I was on our community association for eight years ... and in all the cleanups we did in that community, the two major items that we cleaned up were beverage containers and single-use plastic bags,” said Mr. Bender, a Northampton resident and the former president of the Flanders, Riverside and Northampton Community Association. “So I have always been in favor of it. But getting a complete board in favor—[it] doesn’t sound like that’s something that is going to happen right now.”

Ms. Throne-Holst said she supports a ban on plastic bags but believes a townwide ban isn’t enough—it must be undertaken on a broader scale to have a significant impact.

“I remain in favor of it, but I think the devil is in the details of how you do it,” she said on Tuesday. “My feeling is that the most effective and meaningful way of doing it is on a regional level. It is something that, first and foremost, should be dealt with on a county level but, beyond that, at least East End-wide.”

Both Southampton and East Hampton villages led the way with plastic bag bans in 2011. Ms. Throne-Holst said she has brought up the idea at meetings with other East End supervisors and village mayors, and that there has been interest in a broader ban.

Both Ms. Throne-Holst and Ms. Fleming supported the banning of plastic bags in the town when legislation was originally introduced in 2011. But the then-Town Board’s Republican-Conservative majority killed the bill before it could be brought to a public hearing.

This week, GOP Town Board members Stan Glinka and Christine Scalera said they were not in favor of pursuing a ban because of the potential costs to local merchants.

“There’s going to be a lot of resistance from our business owners because of the costs involved,” said Mr. Glinka, the former president of the Hampton Bays Chamber of Commerce. “Whether you look at the national chains, or at the mom-and-pops, there are cost factors. I hate it when I see these bags wrapped around tree branches too, but I think some more thought has to go into it.”

Ms. Scalera said a ban in Southampton Town alone would not be fair to local business owners, because some shoppers might go to stores in neighboring municipalities that allow them. “If a mother of four is doing her shopping and it’s not convenient to bring 20 bags with her, she may find it easier to go to Riverhead,” she said. “It’s not a burden we should have to carry if the rest of the East End is not.”

Ms. Scalera created the town’s grocery bag recycling outreach program with former Republican Town Board member Chris Nuzzi, promoting recycling education in public schools and at grocery stores and local beaches. The program asks residents to sign a pledge to recycle their bags and hands out town-supplied reusable grocery bags. She said the program has resulted in large improvements in the recycling of plastic grocery bags and is also educating a new generation of children.

“The real issue is people littering,” she said. “And that is not going to be resolved by a ban.”

Ms. Scalera disputed the statistics that she said the waste committee used to come up with its numbers. In fact, she alleges that their numbers show that the town now recycles 12 percent more of its plastic bags than it had in the past.

In its letter to the Town Board, the waste committee said the number of bags getting recycled still pales in comparison to the deluge of plastic that ends up in landfills or dangling from tree branches. The letter points to the ban on plastic bags imposed by Southampton Village in 2011 and says that businesses there, particularly small-business owners, have seen minor impacts on costs, and that in the hundreds of other communities nationwide that have banned the use of the light plastic bags, businesses have adapted easily without negative effects.

“The largest users of these bags are the several large-chain supermarkets,” the committee wrote in its letter. “They are ready and able to deal with a ban on single-use plastic bags.”

Ms. Fleming said that concerns about costs and shoppers looking elsewhere are unfounded, and that surveys by the town’s Green Committee showed that the owners of small shops did not object to a ban of the bags.

“I cannot imagine that shoppers are going to make a decision to go to a different store because plastic bags are not available,” she said. “I think this is the kind of thing that we could take discreet action on, and this municipality could be a leader on, as we have on a number of other things. But I don’t believe we have majority support for it on the board—so I don’t think you’re going to see it.”