Sunday, June 06, 2010

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?

1 comment:

Mike Prelee said...

Cigarette butts can be recycled and put to use inhibiting the corrosion of steel pipes used in drilling. Perhaps we can further exploit our good fortune of being over the Marcellus Shale by becoming a cigarette butt recycling hub for all the steel pipe our area will soon be producing at V & M Steel and TMK IPSCO. Here's a link to the story on BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10116050.stm