what StreetScape 2010 taught me: we are drowning in cigarette litter

saturday's StreetScape 2010 was full of the usual sights:

beautiful buildings and blue skies -


hundred of volunteers planting thousands of flowers -


installing and straightening trees -


stallions through the central square -


and cleaning up hundreds, even thousands of cigarettes -



When pedestrians, bar-goers, co-workers, etc throw their used cigarettes to the ground, they fill in every nook and cranny one can imagine...

...in tree gratings, in flowerbeds, in sidewalk cracks, in puddles, in benches, in parking lots, in the street, etc.

They don't decompose quickly so they linger, and linger, and collect and collect.


they linger on the sidewalk in front of Barley's -


they linger in the cracks next to glasses left out at a martini bar -


they linger in the broken glass recepticals -


they linger in the moat outside the Rosetta Stone -


they linger behind patio gates and beer bottles.

- - -

While the point of this post isn't to beat up on any particular bar owners, the hundreds of people this morning were definitely greeted with the trash from the previous evening.

while the cigarette butts are only one component of what can be considered as "litter", what can we as a group do to prevent the downtown from turning into one big ashtray?

so can the cigarette littering problem ever get better, or are people's habits just set and things will never change?