Story and photos by FERN SHEN

It’s not always easy to see what connects a kid in west Baltimore with a dolphin in the Atlantic or a seal in the Arctic, but Joan Hoblitzell made the link easy to understand last week: she held up a blue plastic supermarket bag.

In the city, the byproduct of too many bags is generally just those ugly clumps of plastic in trees, she explained, to a class of 7th graders at KIPP Ujima Village Academy in Baltimore. But to a creature that’s choking on a bag or being strangled by one, she said, it’s a matter of life and death.

Hoblitzell and her colleagues from the St. George’s Garden Club, Dudley Mason and Krissie Verbic, gave the students a pretty stark slideshow presentation about the damage plastic bags can do to the environment, including killing wildlife.

There were images of sea turtles strangling on plastic bags they mistook for food and a heartbreaking photo of an ibis with a blue Safeway bag wrapped around its head.

And there were hard facts: the economic and environmental cost to produce the more than 80 billion bags Americans use every year . . . the cost to recycle them . . . the hundreds of years they persist in landfills before degrading.

“How many of these do your parents bring home when they go shopping?” Hoblitzell asked. There were shouts of “25!” and “30!”

There was also, in Hoblitzell’s presentation, a solution: switching to re-usable bags.

The women were speaking as part of a joint project by the Baltimore-based club and the M & T Charitable Foundation. Club members have been going to schools across the city this spring, distributing re-usable shopping bags donated by the charitable arm of M & T Bank and talking to students about why they should use them.

Club members have visited more than 20 schools and given away 5,000 bags, according to Sheila Riggs, club president. They also presented for two days at an environmental fair organized by Living Classrooms and visited BizTown, the Junior Achievement Program in Owings Mills, where they talked with additional students.

The idea is to raise awareness about the problem and make it easier for families to cut down on plastic bag use by carrying purchases home in the re-usable cloth bags.

The students were sent home with bags and information on an essay contest about the impact of plastic bags on the environment. The prize: a visit to M & T Bank Stadium, a chance to play on field and a peek in the locker rooms.

“We all have to be more conscious of the impact we have on the environment,” Hoblitzell said. “That means understanding  some science and these students really do!”