Teaching Smokers Neater Habits

Downtown Roanoke Inc. is taking up my wife’s personal mantle with its Friday noontime campaign to deal with cigarette butts and the butts who deposit them on our streets.

Volunteers are meeting on City Market Friday noon-12:30 p.m. to hold signs, yell at people discarding cigarettes and generally get the message out that if you toss cigarettes, you’re a creep … or worse.

If you’re willing to get involved, call Lyndsay Smith at 540-342-2028 x11 or email lyndsays@downtownroanoke.org by later today. Here are some factoids Lyndsay coughed up:

• Every littered cigarette butt can take up anywhere from 2-12 years to biodegrade;
• About 95 percent of cigarette filters are composed of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic which does not quickly degrade and persists in our environment;
• Cigarettes are often littered within 10 feet of a permanent ashtray;
• Most littered cigarette butts travel into waterways through the storm water system.
• Just imagine what that looks like;
• Only 10 percent of cigarette butts are deposited in litter receptacles; In a span of two blocks and Century Park Plaza right here in Roanoke, 1,399 butts were collected. 654 of them were found in Century Park Plaza alone.

So show up and discourage a smoker--already something of a parriah--from also being a slob.