Keep America Beautiful®, the nation’s largest community improvement nonprofit organization, announced it has awarded 47 grants to Keep America Beautiful community-based affiliates and partner organizations for its 2020 Cigarette Litter Prevention Program (CLPP) to reduce the most littered item in America.
Keep America Beautiful is providing individual merit-based grants, totaling more than $500,000 in amounts of $20,000, $10,000, $5,000, and $2,500 to 47 organizations throughout the country. Grants were presented to Keep America Beautiful affiliates, local governments, business improvement districts, downtown associations, parks and recreation commissions, and other organizations dedicated to eradicating litter and beautifying their communities. Communities implementing the CLPP in 2019 reported an average 51 percent reduction of cigarette litter.
As part of the 2020 grant program, Keep America Beautiful is focusing on three primary types of cigarette littering interventions. Applicants will have the opportunity to focus on cigarette litter reduction through public messaging, infrastructure placement, or a combination of both.
“The Cigarette Litter Prevention Program grants empower communities to help mitigate the economic, environmental, and quality-of-life impact of cigarette littering,” said Jerred Jones, program director for the CLPP. “Access to ash receptacles and the dissemination of public education are useful tools to help reduce the most commonly littered item in our litter stream.”
The CLPP, created by Keep America Beautiful in 2002, is the nation’s largest program aimed at eliminating cigarette butt and cigar tip litter. Since its inception, the program has been successfully implemented in more than 1,800 urban, suburban, and rural communities nationwide. Over the past decade, participating communities have consistently cut cigarette butt litter by 50 percent based on local measurements taken in the first four months to six months after program implementation.
To address cigarette butt litter, the Keep America Beautiful Cigarette Litter Prevention Program advocates that communities integrate four proven approaches:
- Encourage enforcement of litter laws, including cigarette litter;
- Raise awareness about the issue using public service messages;
- Place ash receptacles at transition points such as entrances to public buildings; and
- Distribute pocket or portable ashtrays to adult smokers.
Research has shown that even self-reported “non-litterers” often don’t consider tossing cigarette butts on the ground to be “littering.” Keep America Beautiful has found that cigarette butt litter occurs most often at transition points—areas where a person must stop smoking before proceeding into another area. These include bus stops, entrances to stores and public buildings, and the sidewalk areas outside of bars and restaurants, among others.