Yeh BUTT, No BUTT!

Gloucester city centre is turning into one giant sticky ashtray. Despite the Councils best efforts to stop smokers dropping their butt ends and chewing gum, which sticks to the bottom of your shoes, it still remains a major issue. But Gloucester is not unlike most cities throughout the country. We too have a problem with gum and cigarette butts littering their streets. Gloucester has Rangers and expensive advertising but what we really need are proper facilities to dispose of gum and butts.

The Westgate Quarter, which is an organisation comprising of over 60 businesses in Westgate Street and the surrounding area, raised this annoying issue at one of their monthly meetings. Different ideas were researched on how to overcome this issue and   stumbled across ‘Smart Boxes’. They are an original idea possibly the first of its type to been approved and used in a few London City Councils (Fulham Broadway, Kensington and High St London). So with great interest the Westgate Quarter investigated further on whether the same idea could be used for Gloucester.

The units are user friendly, brightly coloured and designed to invite curiosity. They are eye catching and clearly visible from virtually any direction. Importantly they are robustly constructed to discourage vandalism with a lockable door developed to resist tampering. The mouth of the unit is sized and positioned to encourage the placing of gum, rather than throwing of it, but discourages the disposal of larger items of litter. Disposing of cigarette butts is just as easy because a ‘stubbing out lip’ has been built into the opening and positioned so the discarded butt and ash slips directly in the liner. They have been designed to clamp around posts – this includes lamp posts, traffic lights, pedestrian crossing beacon poles and, with the aid of reducing collars and special fixing plates, even onto bollards, walls or other flat surfaces.

After seeing how extraordinarily well the Smart Boxes were working, the Westgate Quarter will be launching them to show that is cares enough about the streets that we live. This should change social habits and make a stance. To encourage awareness, on the front of each unit there is a discreet badge area for companies wishing to display their own corporate branding, this is why the Westgate Quarter are looking for sponsors. With the help of local businesses, Gloucester can be the first city, outside London, to have these unit installed. This would help towards reducing the 40% of cigarette litter in the U.K. (Source ENCAMS); 122 tons of cigarette butts/litter per day in the U.K.(Source ENCAMS) and reduce street cleaning costs. If only 20% of the units capacity was filled with gum, it would have removed 305 pieces from our streets, equating to a saving of £30.50 per day in cleaning costs (Estimated cost to remove one piece of gum of the street is widely quote at 10p to 30p. (Source ENCAMS)). This means within 10 cleaning visit the units would have paid for themselves based on the lowest estimate of alternative cost to steam cleaning the street. The Westgate Quarter will have their own maintenance contract in place to make sure the units are cleaned and washed on a regular basis.

With the ban on smoking in public places coming into effect from July it doesn’t take much to realise how much of a knock on effect this could have to our streets. Many companies or businesses already have a no smoking policy in place, plus you add to that many employees eat chewing gum. With these units installed throughout the city streets, this would help employers with the disposal of this sticky issue. Visitors to Gloucester would also see a community actively caring about its city.