Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful (KPB) received a $20,000 grant from Keep America Beautiful to continue its work with the Keep America Beautiful Cigarette Litter Prevention Program (CLPP), a national program aimed at reducing cigarette litter. This is the 10th year that KPB received funding from the national organization.
KPB will partner with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), focusing on Pennsylvania state parks. To combat against cigarette litter, the program advocates that participating communities focus on three primary types of cigarette littering interventions: public messaging, infrastructure placement, or a combination of both.
Keep America Beautiful provided individual merit-based grants, totaling more than $500,000, to 47 organizations throughout the country, including KPB. 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 communities.
Previously, Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful worked with the Pennsylvania DCNR to implement the program in various state parks. The final scan, performed after the installation of ash receptacles, education implementation, and the distribution of portable ashtrays, documented reduction rates of up to 89%.
The CLPP was created by Keep America Beautiful in 2002. Since its inception, the program has been successfully implemented in more than 1,800 urban, suburban, and rural communities nationwide.
Research has shown that even self-reported "non-litterers" often do not 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.
For more information, readers may visit http://www.keeppabeautiful.org.
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