Take Pride Winnipeg wants to show Winnipeggers the true impact of a particular kind of litter.
This Saturday, the community cleanup group will be sending volunteers out onto city streets to pick up — and count — as many discarded cigarette butts as they can find, as part of their first-ever ‘butt blitz’.
Take Pride’s Tom Ethans told 680 CJOB that people might be surprised by just how many they find.
“My summer students were out on Friday, I asked them to pick up cigarette butts on Portage Ave near Polo Park and near the A&W,” Ethans said.
“In one hour and 15 minutes they picked up and counted 4,172 cigarette butts. Cigarette butts account for 30-35 per cent of litter on our streets.
“They don’t biodegrade — many of them end up in our rivers and lakes, and they can hurt our wildlife. It’s a very major problem that needs to stop.”
Ethans said Take Pride will be providing volunteers with bags and gloves in an effort to see how big the problem really is. He’s expecting between 35 and 50,000 discarded butts by the end of the day.
“People don’t really see cigarette butts as trash — they just flick ’em out of their cars and flick ’em onto the streets, and they think it’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just a small little thing.
“Outside Winnipeg in forested areas, there have been many forest fires attributed to cigarette butts. So it’s damaging to our environment and damaging to the planet as well.”
The goal is to take a photo of all of the collected butts — something Ethan says will be ‘a big, huge mess of litter’ to give Winnipeggers perspective.
“We just want people to understand how they can help to make our city look better just by not putting their cigarettes on the ground,” he said.
“Throwing a cigarette butt is littering, just as throwing out a coffee cup or throwing out a fast food container. It’s all littering.
“I think if somebody sees a pic of 50,000 cigarette butts all in a pile, it might make people think they want to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.”
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