Russell County received one of the 30 in 30 grants from Keep Virginia Beautiful. The grant that we received was for Cigarette Litter Prevention. The grant was administered in one of our local towns that had a lot of foot traffic as well as cigarette litter. The majority of the grant funds was used to purchase cigarette litter receptacles and personalized flyers. The flyers bring awareness to those who look at it that cigarettes butts are litter too. The receptacles were given to the local businesses to place outside for their patrons to use. The program was a good ice breaker, because once I told them what my department was doing with the receptacles and the program, a many of long conversations began about litter. The local businesses all agreed that they had a lot of cigarette litter outside of their buildings. Many of the businesses and myself agreed that the majority of the problem may be that the reasons why patrons threw their cigarette butts down on the ground was because they did not have a proper place to dispose of them. My department and two volunteers walked along the sidewalks and approximately 10ft from the curb of the sidewalks and picked up and counted cigarette butts for approximately a 100ft length of street. Our initial count was 410 cigarette butts in that length of street. We placed the cigarette receptacles out in front of the businesses that wanted to participate with the program and left them for several weeks. We returned six weeks later to do a second count to see how effective the receptacles were. On the second count, we reduced our cigarette litter by nearly half at 206 cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street. To us, it definitely seemed liked the receptacles are working. My department has only one more task to complete with the Cigarette Litter Program for KVB and that is to purchase billboard space during the 2012 Great American Cleanup promoting awareness about cigarette litter. My hopes are that the billboards will promote awareness locally, county-wide, and regionally. We’ll see how well it does in March 2012.