Media works to banish cigarette butts

The eclectic borough of Media offers plenty of charming sights, from the trolley clattering down its main drag, to gorgeous Victorian homes and a two-square-block Neoclassic courthouse on whose steps William Jennings Bryan once orated.

In recent years, the town also has given pedestrians a not-so-charming sight: cigarette butts galore. They have clogged sidewalk crevices and brickwork, cluttered tree wells, and collected in doorways. As smokers increasingly have been chased outside, the problem has flared.

Now, taking up the same fight as Philadelphia, Ardmore and Whitemarsh Township, Media is battling butts by trying to change smokers' behavior. Its arsenal includes pocket ashtrays (metal-lined containers that can hold five butts for later disposal), sleek ash urns at key locations, and catchy public service messages ("Your Butt Belongs Here" atop pictures of receptacles).

Initial results from Media's butt-banishing campaign look promising. At the program's start last fall, the number of stubs in a two-block area totaled 1,620 (yes, someone counted). One month into the campaign, the tally fell by one-third, to 1,081, still leaving a lot of stubs underfoot.

Sustaining even that decrease could be hard, officials say.

"We can never make this fully go away," said Brian Hall, vice president of the Media Borough Council and its self-described litter guy.

Cigarette debris is the most littered item, according to Bronwen Evans, a program manager at Keep America Beautiful, a Connecticut-based nonprofit. The group began its Cigarette Litter Prevention Program in 2002 and expanded it last year to 80 communities, including Media, Ardmore and Whitemarsh. Philadelphia signed on in 2006.

Discarded butts are trouble worldwide.

In the annual International Coastal Cleanup last September, 350,000 volunteers picked up 1.9 million butts in three hours - the No. 1 item collected and one-quarter of the total bagged, said Tom McCann, spokesman for the nonprofit environmental group Ocean Conservancy.

"Trash travels," he said. "It's going to move through waterways that ultimately end up in the ocean."

Environmentalists also worry that toxins trapped in cigarette filters, such as arsenic and vinyl chloride, can leach into groundwater. Most filters are made of cellulose acetate fibers that do not easily deteriorate.

For most people, though, it's about appearances.

"The general public does not like to see it," said Barbara Van Clief, eastern regional director in Newtown Square of the environmental group Pennsylvania Resources Council.

Hall, the borough councilman, can vouch for that.

"Folks can smoke," he said, ". . . but I do have a problem when, rather than finding a receptacle, people just toss cigarettes onto the ground or out of the car. They think it's small things, and they disappear. They don't disappear."

The courthouse, for instance, is a smoke-free building. Workers, jurors and others congregate to puff in the courtyard, and near a bench across the street from the main entrance. The remnants often wind up on the ground.

For the first time last year, Keep America Beautiful gave grants to communities in its cigarette-litter program, funded by Philip Morris. Media, Ardmore and Whitemarsh each got $2,500.

The program encourages them to review their litter ordinances, with the aim of including cigarettes as litter.

Media has not changed its rules to target butts specifically. "How do you enforce it?" Hall asked.

Instead, the town opted for education. The borough hall, municipal center and businesses gave out 1,000 pocket ashtrays with the message "Thank you for not littering." An additional 20 black ash urns were installed downtown, including across from the courthouse, outside the post office on Baltimore Pike, and near a tobacco shop.

To gauge the program's success, volunteers count the number of dropped butts.

Both Ardmore and Whitemarsh have fared better than Media.

Ardmore saw a 67 percent drop, although it only started with 374 butts last summer, said Van Clief of the Resources Council, which monitors the programs.

In sprawling Whitemarsh, which focused on its roadways and strip mall parking lots, butts were reduced by 46 percent, she said.

In the program nationally, the average decrease was 55 percent last year, according Evans of Keep America Beautiful. Media fell below that, she said, but the more important measure will be the borough's ability to "sustain that reduction."

The program's strategy is known as social marketing, which sells an idea rather than a product or service.

"We're trying to change behavior," Natalie Wood, assistant director for the Center for Consumer Research at St. Joseph's University, said of the concept, which has long been applied to the problem of drinking and driving.

The habit "has to become unsexy, unpopular," she said. "Then people start to change their attitude."

Outside the courthouse recently, several smokers said that they were unaware of the borough's campaign but that they never left their butts on the ground. "I always find someplace to put it," said juror Janet Venish, 53, of Aston.

Pravin Patel, who co-owns Rose's Newstand and said he sells 700-plus packs of cigarettes a week, has noticed fewer stubs outside his business on Olive Street. But he still sweeps up about 40 a week - with an ash urn just steps away.

"I do mind," he said. "It's extra work for me."