by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
Former City Council member Elaine Brown remembers the incident well.
She was sitting at a light when a car pulled up beside her in the left turn lane. After a moment or two, the driver opened his door, leaned out and did something. The signal turned green and he turned left.
“There was this big mound of cigarette butts,” said Brown, who is current running for the State House of Representatives. “I was so mad.”
Council member Art Graham also remembers an incident well.
He was sitting outside eating with a friend when the wind grabbed a paper napkin and blew it away.
“She chased that napkin about 50 or 60 feet,” said Graham.
When the friend got back, she finished her cigarette and flicked the butt away.
“It never dawned on her that she was littering,” he said.
The days of callously flicking a cigarette butt into the street or emptying an ashtray in a parking lot are coming to an end if Brown, Graham, Mayor John Peyton and Keep Jacksonville Beautiful Commission chair Anna Dooley have anything to say about it.
Friday, Peyton and the rest of the group rolled out a new campaign — “Keep Your Butts to Yourself” — an initiative designed to encourage smokers to properly dispose of cigarette butts. For Brown, this has been a long time coming.
“I started this idea about a year ago and began working with the mayor,” said Brown. “Now, I am glad we are getting this done. It’s important to the future of the environment in Jacksonville.”
At the time, the City was using public service announcements to fight the butt battle. Those PSAs weren’t working and Brown wanted something better. Friday, two new PSAs debuted. One shows a girl tossing a butt onto the ground in front of the library. A guy then picks it up, stops her and without fanfare, drops the butt into her cup of coffee. The other shows a picnic in which someone gets a sandwich with a butt in the middle of it. Both messages drive home the point.
“Research shows that most people disposing of cigarette butts on public property don’t think of it as littering,” said Dooley. “We must change that mind set starting today. The parks and streets are not their ashtrays.”
Peyton wanted to know who came up with the slogan.
“It’s beautiful. It says it all,” said Peyton, calling Jacksonville’s bigger intersections “visual blight” due to the number of cigarette butts and other littler. “Cigarette butts are the largest percentage of litter when we do voluntary trash pick ups.”
According to Graham, there are roughly 200,000 smokers in Jacksonville. If each smoker only tossed one cigarette butt on the ground a day, there would be 73 million cigarette butts on the streets, beaches, sidewalks and parks.
Dooley said the biggest misconception about cigarette butts is that they are easily biodegradable.
“It takes at least 15 years for a cigarette butt to decompose,” she said.