Tuesday, January 05, 2010

About those butt bins

A quick update from Moira Quinn at Charlotte Center City Partners, re the new cigarette urns uptown:

"The urns are all in Uptown. They were installed on Wednesday, December 30. The TOTAL cost for all 24 was $3,000 (about $125 each). They will save a lot of man-hours to keep city crews from picking up the cigarette butts from the sidewalks. We pride ourselves on having clean sidewalks, so we would have expected our uptown crews to sweep them up. Hopefully, there will be fewer to sweep and those crews can spend their time doing other work."


This refers to my posting yesterday about the new cigarette urns.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Sweat! When do they put the mosaic tiles on them?

Anonymous said...

So the city spent $3k to add urns to the sides of trash cans, believing their presence will make smokers suddenly stop throwing butts on the sidewalk and put them in these containers.

This is dilusional. If the urn is more than 2 feet away from the smoker, the smoker is going to throw the butt on the ground like (s)he always does.

It's not a lot of money, but they're not going to be used any more than the trash cans are. People are far too lazy.

Anonymous said...

Those look nice. Too bad they won't get used.

Smokers are stupid and inconsiderate. What makes anyone think they have the intelligence to use such a receptacle? It takes EFFORT to walk all the way over there and then you have to actually put the stinkarette inside the thing.

Anonymous said...

they will still have to clean the sidewalks like before for the ones that don't use the bins AND now they will have to empty/maintain all the bins.

Waste again.

Anonymous said...

To clarify, this is a nice idea; I just have a hard time seeing it making a real difference.

You'd be amazed how lazy some people can be. The other day when I went to catch my morning bus, there was darn near an entire Bojangles' meal scattered throughout the bus shelter - with an empty trash can literally three paces away.

And anon 8:50 makes a good point - smokers tend to be even less conscious of the mess they leave than non-smokers.

Anonymous said...

So what is the reality? Are there less butts on the ground? Are smokers using them?

Anonymous said...

They are actually being used and saving the clean up crews at least an hour a day to sweep up the butts.