A UK-based organization Hubbub has come up with some incredible ideas to encourage people to maintain cleanliness of London roads.
The organization installed some voting ashtrays on various public spaces around the city.
The box is divided into two compartments and provide a small hole to insert cigarette butt into one of them. The box carries a question like who is the best football player in the world, Ronaldo or Messi? If you want to vote for Ronaldo, then insert your cigarette butt into the compartment carrying his name.
Other boxes also carry questions that ask people for vote for their choice through cigarette butts. For instance, most of people in London would find it interesting to vote for a question asking ‘What would you rather watch; The Italian Grand Prix or Tennis US Open?
Apparently, the transparent box display the answer as it continues to collect more butts. The one with higher number of butts is the winner.
That’s really clever. It engages smokers and encourages them to dispose off butts properly. While, the citizen are quite aware and consider littering as a disgusting habit, one third of the population still practice littering. A cigarette butt takes almost a decade to bio-degrade if not disposed properly.
There is another experiment from the same organization that ask people to stick their chewing-gums on a board instead of littering. The board carry facts about chewing-gum waste and comparison between manufacturing and cleaning costs. On its webpage Hubbub writes,
“Our public polling discovered that a staggering 86 per cent of people think littering is a disgusting habit yet only 15 per cent of us would actually confront someone and tell them that,” the organization writes on its webpage. “This is why from May to October we’re trialling a new approach to tackling littering on Villiers Street, Westminster, using the latest thinking on behaviour change and awareness raising from around the world.”