Scott Brinton

Plastic bags: throwaway culture par excellence

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Pulling the frayed plastic bag from the muck revealed a killing field. A dozen or more fiddler crabs lay dead beneath the bag, which sat flat against the Spartina grass mudflat.

Twelve years have passed since I uncovered those lifeless crabs during a Freeport SPLASH (Stop Polluting Littering and Save Harbors) cleanup in the bays south of Freeport, but the memory still haunts me.

Fiddler crabs play a critical role in sustaining the wetlands. Without them, an entire ecosystem could suffer. The crabs’ deaths were unnecessary. That plastic bag didn’t need to be there. But it was.

The deeper reason that their deaths concerned me is that I know, with certainty, that they weren’t an isolated case. Plastic bags –– the sort distributed at supermarkets and all manner of businesses across the U.S. –– are ubiquitous in the environment after more than three decades of their use. They kill an untold number of wild creatures every day.

Blame Kroger and Safeway, two of the U.S.’s supermarket giants. In 1982, they were the first to phase out paper bags in favor of plastic ones, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today Americans throw away an estimated 100 billion plastic bags every year, consuming tens of millions of barrels of oil, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit organization committed to sustainable development. It’s little wonder that ExxonMobil introduced the plastic bag to the U.S. in the late 1960s and ’70s, according to the article “The Plastic Bag Wars” (Rolling Stone, 2011).

Mercifully, the Long Beach City Council recently acted to change the world for the better by imposing a 5-cents-per-bag fee on the plastic bags that consumers too often take for granted. The fee is intended to raise awareness of the environmental hazards that plastic bags pose and reduce their use without banning them (which, to my mind, would have been a better option).

Baby steps.

Scott Bochner, a member of Long Beach’s Environmental Advisory Board, said that 10,000 plastic bags –– 10,000 –– were removed from South Shore wetlands last year alone. That’s a lot of dead fiddler crabs.

“We continue to clean these bags out of the Western Bays every single day,” Bochner said at a recent rally in support of the plastic-bag fee, according to a Long Beach Herald article titled “City passes law to curb plastic-bag pollution,” by Ben Strack. “We are joining the rest of the planet to get rid of these single-use plastic bags. Long Beach is ready to bring their own bag when they shop.”

The city is the first Nassau County municipality to charge for plastic bags. The fee will take effect after a seven-month educational period, and local stores will keep the proceeds.

Nassau County Legislator Laura Curran, a Democrat from Baldwin, recently encouraged the Village of Freeport to ban plastic bags. Here’s hoping.

Back to the fiddler crabs.

These little guys, not much larger than your thumb, live for only a year or two. They provide sustenance for any number of big birds, including the majestic great white egret and blue heron, both of which grace South Shore wetlands.

The fiddler crab is known for its distinctive enlarged claw, which is disproportionately massive compared to its shelled carapace, or body, its other normal-sized claw and eight pencil-like legs, which allow it to scurry over the mud with the greatest of ease. The claw reminds us of a violin — hence the creature’s name.

We place no value on fiddler crabs. Humans don’t eat them, so we don’t understand their importance, their place amid a highly complex ecosystem. Science tells us, though, that nature is an interconnected web of seemingly disparate lives, each of which depends on others. Remove one, or reduce its numbers, and other creatures inevitably suffer. The environment degrades. Eventually it’s a mere shell of its former self. Such is the case with our South Shore wetlands.

We desperately need those wetlands, however. On Saturday we’ll remember Superstorm Sandy, which ripped apart much of the South Shore south of Merrick Road. The wetlands, with hundreds of mudflats scattered throughout, act as giant sponges when the Atlantic Ocean rises up during storms like Sandy. You can only imagine the devastation the storm would have wrought across the South Shore if the wetlands hadn’t been there. Communities were devastated, but most were spared much of the worst damage suffered by Long Beach, which the ocean punished without mercy.

Many folks tell me they use plastic bags to line their bathroom trash cans. Good idea. Most people, however, do not. They throw them away with the rest of their garbage. The bags are then collected in trucks. Inevitably, many fly out when the trucks’ back hatches are opened so more trash can be loaded in.

The wind blows the bags into the wetlands, where they cover the fiddler crabs’ holes, suffocating them.

Scott Brinton is the Herald Community Newspapers’ senior editor for enterprise reporting and staff development and an adjunct professor at the Hofstra University Herbert School of Communication. Comments? SBrinton@liherald.com.