Daily Reveille

Issue date: 2/26/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Kim Foster Midterms week is often a time when students are looking to relieve stress, and some students turn to smoking for help. Increased smoking could mean more cigarette butts littering the campus.

Midterms week is often a time when students are looking to relieve stress, and some students turn to smoking for help. Increased smoking could mean more cigarette butts littering the campus.

The Residence Hall Association and Gays, Bisexuals, Lesbians and Supporters United are teaming up for a new campaign, rightly named Kick the Butt, to clean up cigarette butt litter on campus.

"It's kind of making awareness of cigarette butts as litter and just trying to keep the campus cleaner," said Will Monson, RHA president.

Cigarettelitter.org, a non-profit Web site and organization that runs education programs to help reduce cigarette litter, said cigarette butts are "the most littered item in America."

The Web site also states "the toxic residue in cigarette filters is damaging to the environment, and littered butts cause numerous fires every year, some of them fatal."

Monson said the ultimate goal of the program is to increase littering awareness. He said people don't consider cigarette butts as trash or how long they take to decompose.

"These things don't break down like if you threw an orange peel away" Monson said.

Isabel Blum, treasurer of GBLSU, said the organization "wanted to do a service project" aimed at not only issues that affect the LGBT community, but also the University community.

Blum said the goal of the program is to make the University's environment cleaner.

"The first step is going to be to actually go and clean up cigarette butts on the ground in areas that are usually packed like around Middleton Library," Blum said.

She also said they plan to clean up the cigarette litter near the Pentagon Testing Center, "which is going to be chock full of smokers trying to cram in their last relief before an exam."

"People are going to smoke," Monson said. "They should throw [cigarette butts] away in the trash can instead of littering."

Monson said the program will involve cleaning up actual cigarette butt litter, and he said they would create signs to tell people how much litter they collected following the project.

Blum said anyone can join the campaign, and they plan to do the service project again later in the year. She said she hopes to expand the program in the future by getting funding for cigarette butt receptacles in areas on campus where people often smoke.

Another goal of the program is to hand out fliers to students explaining how hazardous littered cigarette butts are, Blum said.

"A lot of people think they're cotton," Blum said of the filters. "But they're actually a form of plastic. Depending on the environment, the filter can take 18 months to ten years to decompose."



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Contact Meredith Harper at mharper@lsureveille.com

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