An anti-littering campaign here called No Fling Spring is picking up speed, along with roadside trash. Last week members of East Hampton Town’s litter action committee, bedecked in reflective safety vests reading “Don’t Trash East Hampton,” presented the town board with their plans for a public service announcement aimed at drawing in the Hamptons International Film Festival, LTV, the Neo-Political Cowgirls dance and theater company, and students from East Hampton High School.
Barbara DiLorenzo, a committee member and artist, told the board that anti-litter activists, concerned about an increase in litterbugging along local roads in recent years, will be producing the P.S.A. video this spring, in addition to launching “highly visible” trash pickup efforts and enhancing their presence at farmers markets and other gatherings.
The P.S.A. is a highlight in the form of a contest, Ms. DiLorenzo said. The town has approved $3,000 for the contest, in which students will produce anti-littering videos and then compete with one another for the top honor of $300 and repeated airings on LTV and elsewhere. Runners-up would win $100 each, with the remaining budget pegged for production and postproduction costs to make the videos, according to Councilwoman Cate Rogers.
The wide-ranging assortment of groups that will be producing and judging the P.S.A.s dates to several years ago, said Josh Gladstone, who joined LTV earlier this year as an associate producer after departing from his longtime post as artistic director of Guild Hall’s stage program in late 2021. Mr. Gladstone recalled that he had been part of a group, including the Neo-Political Cowgirls and the film festival, that had gone to the high school following the suicide of a student there with a goal of connecting with the students.
For her part, Ms. Rogers invoked an iconic anti-littering P.S.A. from her early-1970s childhood that featured a tearful Italian-American actor named Iron Eyes Cody dressed as a Native American standing roadside. She noted the power of repetition.
The winning P.S.A., she said, would be deployed “over and over again. We need the repetition of messaging.”
