Smokers strolling down Court Street likely have noticed new cigarette butt receptacles installed uptown.

For those who haven’t, the city recently installed 12 new containers through a Keep America Beautiful grant program, bringing the city’s total to more than 60 containers, Athens Mayor Steve Patterson confirmed last Wednesday.

Keep America Beautiful (KAB) grant funds, provided through the organisation’s Cigarette Litter Prevention Program, also partially funded the first batch of 52 cigarette butt bins placed last year on Court Street, which were painted by Passion Works, Patterson said Friday. A grant from the Athens County Foundation also helped fund the initial, more artistic bins, he said.

In December, 2018, Gary Chancey of Keep Southeast Ohio Beautiful (KSOB), a regional affiliate of KAB managed by the Wayne National Forest, reached out to the city of Athens and other KSOB participants (including the small southeast Ohio cities of Ironton, Logan and Nelsonville) to notify them of the opportunity for more bins, Patterson said.

“We put together a real brief grant proposal,” Patterson said, and “two months later” the bins were here and ready to go. They arrived and were placed uptown last month.

Since the Passion Works project that decorated the first batch of bins was funded by additional grant monies, Patterson said the new bins will not be painted, as the most recent grant didn’t include the costs for such a project. Patterson said he does plan to place on the new bins stickers that were used on the previous decorated bins to notify pedestrians of their purpose. The stickers read: “RECYCLE BUTTS HERE.”

The new containers are black and more slender than the decorated ones, making them less conspicuous. Patterson said he hopes adding the larger stickers “will make them pop” in lieu of colorful paint.

Despite what people may think, cigarette butts are mostly made of a plastic called celulose acetate and therefore take a long time to decompose — anywhere from 18 months to 10 years, according to one study published in 2015.

Once the butts are collected, they are placed in shipping containers and sent to a company called TerraCycle, Patterson said. TerraCycle has a program by which those butts are sterilized, melted down, and converted to plastic material that can be used for other things, “like park benches,” for example, Patterson explained. According to the program’s website, there is no cost to join and participate in the butt-recycling program.

According to Patterson, 62 pounds of cigarette butts had been collected from the bins by fall of 2016. In 2017, that number went up to 70 pounds and last year, 192 pounds of cigarette butts were collected. (City employees Colton James and Dane Coger, who installed the bins, are responsible for emptying the bins, as well as much of the city’s landscaping work).

With the new bins in place, a cigarette butt receptacle can be seen on nearly every lamp post uptown, increasing the convenience for smokers to properly dispose of the butts.

“I expect, once again, a large jump in cigarette butts collected” this year, Patterson said.