FEATURE
NO BUTTS ABOUT IT
How much better is vaping for the environment than smoking? More than
half a million people in the UK took part in the month long Great British
Spring Clean to clean up Britain – the most littered item? Cigarette butts.
By Lucy MacKinnon
T
he Great British Spring Clean 2019 (GBSC) saw
563,163 litter heroes across Britain take to the streets
and waterways on operation clean up this spring. Volunteers
took part in 17,097 GBSC separate events, amounting to
more than one million hours spent litter picking.
Jason Alexander was heavily involved in the Keep Britain
Tidy campaign. The founder of Rubbish Walks UK made it
his mission last year to pick up one million cigarette butts
from British streets, promoting National Blitz The Butt Day on
August 24 to help him reach this goal.
“We are currently at 153,874 and that is a lot, we’ve still got
a way to go. But if I can encourage one thousand people
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across the country to pick up one thousand cigarette butts,
which is easy to do because they are everywhere that’s one
million cigarette butts.”
Cigarette butts are one of the biggest plastic pollutants on the
planet. More than half of daily smokers (52 percent) believe
putting cigarette ends down drains is acceptable, while 11
percent do not consider them to be litter, according to new
statistics.
Jason says this is a year-round problem.
“I do think the key thing is to try and appreciate this isn’t just
a problem once a year that by doing a couple of beach cleans
or litter picks and GBSC that we’ve done our bit and then we
can go back to old habits. These campaigns are something