Street smokers: Remove your butts

Hey smokers: When you drop a cigarette butt, that’s littering.

Vancouver’s Downtown Association is taking this message to the community as part of a new “No Ifs, Ands or Butts” campaign in a joint effort to clear cigarette-butt litter from city center streets. The project will be unveiled this month.

“You walk around downtown and cigarettes are everywhere,” said Patricia Coulthard, co-chairwoman of the campaign’s committee. “They’re in the gutters. They’re in the planters.”

The goal is twofold: First, encourage smokers to properly dispose of cigarette butts; and second, clean up litter that’s already present.

So far, the campaign is relying on individual businesses to collect the cigarette butts. A more specific plan is in the works.

The committee’s efforts will focus on the area south of Mill Plain Boulevard between C and Washington streets, and between Main Street and Broadway, Coulthard said. Those areas have the most cigarette-butt litter.

The campaign will get the word out with fliers inserted into city water and sewer bills and with posters in C-Tran buses. The city of Vancouver, the Esther Short Neighborhood Association, Vancouver Police and C-Tran are campaign partners.

The downtown group is also making a plea for donations to buy receptacles to place on both sides of the street of every block in the downtown core, where more than 37 pounds of cigarette butts were picked up during the association’s spring cleanup day last May.

Gold Rush Restaurant & Lounge on Main Street is one of the businesses taking part in the campaign. A worker has been out each day, cleaning a strip of sidewalk outside the restaurant.

Lots of cigarette-butt litter turns up outside bars such as the Gold Rush, Coulthard said.