NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) - We all see cigarette butts along the sidewalks and streets every day, but in North Little Rock's Argenta District, you may start to see less.
Thanks to a grant, smokers now have 12 cigarette receptacles up and down Main Street to drop their cigarette butts in.
They were installed about a month ago and already people are noticing cleaner streets.
"It’s a personal choice to smoke, but when you put it on the ground its everybody’s problem then," said Randy Naylor, president of
Keep North Little Rock Beautiful.
Cigarette butts are the most littered item in the country and the world according to
Keep America Beautiful.
"In a three-block area we picked up 600 cigarette butts," said Naylor on the few hours he spent surveying the area in June.
He teamed up with Argenta Downtown Council and was awarded a $2,500 grant from the
Cigarette Litter Prevention Program to install the receptacles.
Argenta Downtown Council will service the receptacles. That crew has been responsible for cleaning up the butts on a daily basis.
"We’ve noticed a pretty big difference. There were a lot of cigarette butts on the street, our team was out having to pick them up all day, and now it’s not quite so bad," said Chris Kent, Executive Director of Argenta Downtown Council.
All of the butts are collected about once a week then sent to
TerraCycle.
“They recycle every part of the cigarette," said Kent.
They plan to survey the streets again in a few months to track how well these are working, with hopes of one day adding more.