Dr. Wansoo Im of Rutgers University and his Community Mapping Class have organized an event to map cigarette butts on the College Ave Campus.
The mission was to determine if there was a correlation between the availability and condition of cigarette receptacles to discarded cigarette butts littered on the ground.
The condition was much worse than anticipated. From a distance, many of the lawns and public spaces looked pristine, but after intentionally looking for cigarette butts, many of the students did not get very far. Cigarette butts were littered all everywhere, lining the edges of the sidewalk, filling the grates surrounding street trees, and scattered around benches and bus stops. Many cigarette butts were found within close proximity to the available cigarette receptacles.
This exercise was eye-opening creating awareness for those who participated. Something small like a discarded cigarette butt goes unnoticed by the average person traveling through, but once the students started looking for them, they realized they were everywhere.
This event was important to create awareness for the state of our public spaces. Cigarette butts are extremely harmful to the environment and take up to 30 years to biodegrade. Smokers should take part in an exercise such as this to learn how one discarded cigarette butt can add up to a detrimental amount of pollution in a shared public area, affecting our soils and water.