Keep America Beautiful Presents 2020 Cigarette Litter Prevention Grant to Keep Eucid Beautiful

Keep America Beautiful, the nation's largest community improvement nonprofit organization, announced it has awarded a $2500.00 2020 Cigarette Litter Prevention Program (CLPP) grant to Keep Euclid Beautiful to address cigarette litter in the City of Euclid. 

This will include the installation of cigarette receptacles at four busy RTA bus stops in the City of Euclid.  Keep Euclid Beautiful had installed four other receptacles the previous year with a CLPP grant, so this will bring the total to eight cigarette receptacles placed throughout the City of Euclid. 

Chairperson of Keep Euclid Beautiful, Linda Beck, says, "The spots where receptacles are installed have had amazing results.  Keep Euclid Beautiful surveys the areas and the cigarette butts on the ground have been reduced by 68% in the first year.  Our Team is really proud that we can do something effective to keep this type of litter from being washed into the sewers and out into Lake Erie".

Keep America Beautiful provided individual merit-based grants, totaling more than $500,000, to 47 organizations throughout the country, including Keep Euclid Beautiful.  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 communites.  Communties implementing the CLPP in 2019 reported an average 51% 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 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 had been successfully implemented in more than 1,800 urban, suburban and rural communities nationwide.  Over the past decade, participating communites have consistently cut cigarette butt litter by 50% based on local measurements taken in the first four months to six months after program implementation.

Research has shown that even self-reported "non-litteres" 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.

The Cigarette Litter Prevention Program is supported by funding from Philip Morris USA; RAI Services Company; and the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company.

Keep Euclid Beautiful empowers neighborhoods and residents to take greater responsibility for improving our local environment through litter prevention, beautification, community greening, waste reduction and recycling.

Linda Beck

Secretary to the Mayor's Office, Chairperson for Keep Euclid Beautiful, Member of Keep Euclid Beautiful Team / Secretary for the Shade Tree Commission

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Volume 11, Issue 7, Posted 4:52 PM, 07.06.2020