Cigarette butt crackdown a success: city

Two summer pilot projects that included the installation of 122 outdoor ashtrays resulted in an 87 per cent reduction in the number of cigarette butts tossed on Jasper Avenue, city officials said Thursday.

"This pilot basically demonstrated that you can address it if you give smokers the tools to act responsibly," said Don Belanger, program manager with the city's Capital City Cleanup program.

During the pilot projects, city officials installed the ashtrays and launched a public education program in a bid to encourage smokers to stop throwing their butts on the sidewalk. Street teams also handed out pocket ashtrays to smokers.

The city counted the number of cigarette butts in the ashtrays and compared it with the number of butts on the ground at various points along Jasper.

The projects culminated in a two-week enforcement crackdown in August, which resulted in bylaw officers issuing four $250 tickets and seven warnings.

But the relatively low number of tickets and warnings showed the other measures were working, said John Wilson, director of complaints and investigations for the city's community standards branch.

"The compliance rates were pretty high. It would seem that the public education component and the public awareness activities that we engaged in really did their job," he said. 

The city also installed an additional 70 ashtrays along Whyte Avenue, Edmonton's most popular strip of stores, restaurants and nightclubs.

City council will evaluate the outcome of the projects in mid-November and decide whether they will should be continued, and even expanded into other high traffic areas of Edmonton.