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Fogelson finds cigarette butts littered everywhere on the Winona State University campus — in the cracks of sidewalks, in the mulch of rock gardens and flicked haphazardly near the hundred or so ashtray receptacles outside the entrance of nearly every campus building.
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Winona State University senior, Bryce Fogelson, 22, left, talks Thursday with Matt Cash, 22, and Chelsea Jamieson, 20, also WSU students, about cigarette litter on campus. Fogelson picked up thousands of cigarette butts, which had been thrown on the ground around campus, and displayed them Friday in Kryszko Commons to make students aware of the litter problem.
(Photo by Melissa Carlo/Winona Daily News) |
The full-time WSU senior and part-time campus maintenance worker — a job funded by taxpayers — sucks up the littered butts with a vacuum reverse blower.
But after three years on cigarette patrol, he’s seen enough.
Fogelson collected thousands of stray cigarette butts littering the campus over the past month and put the heaping pile on display for his fellow students Thursday in WSU’s Kryzsko Commons. All brands — the camel and cowboy included — were well-represented.
Debates over a campus-wide smoking ban have been brewing since Minnesota passed anti-smoking legislation last October, but Fogelson said his solo campaign is strictly anti-litter and is meant to highlight a pollution problem. He plans to launch a Web site, Expandingeffort.org, this fall for similar community-action projects.
“I’m kind of sick of picking up other people’s garbage, and the school shouldn’t have to pay me to do it,” said Fogelson, a 22-year-old accounting major. “There’s trash all over campus, and some days are worse than others, but cigarettes are a 100 times worse than anything.”
Even eco-conscious people don’t seem to care about littering small things like gum or cigarettes, Fogelson said.
But it adds up.
More than 150 butts and 13 wads of gum still are in a small rock garden outside the main entrance of Kryzsko Commons — just a drop in the hat to the 7 trillion cigarette butts littered a year, according to nonprofit Cigarette Litter.org.
Cigarette butt filters trap the dangerous byproducts of smoking, including arsenic, ammonia, lead and 162 other toxic chemicals. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency includes the toxic chemicals found in cigarette butts among many indirect sources of pollutants leaching into the environment.
Cigarette littering seems more prevalent in the spring after the snow melt, because the “snow hides all their sins,” said Bill Meyer, a
senior groundskeeper at WSU for 20 years. He hoped Fogelson’s display increases awareness.
“What’s impressed us is his honesty with the project,” Meyer said. “We’ve offered to add cigarette butts from urns, and he said no.”
Many students walked by Fogelson’s display Thursday, offering thoughts and comments.
Nursing sophomore Chelsea Jamieson, 20, said WSU seems to take pride in promoting student health and the beauty of the campus’ landscape but doesn’t address this preventable problem.
“People are too lazy to take that extra 15 seconds,” said Matt Cash, junior criminal justice major.
Not everyone has been supportive.
“I’ve been told by one guy to get a (expletive) life,” Fogelson said. “But I think he thought I was anti-smoking.”
Contact reporter Amber Dulek at amber.dulek@lee.net or (507) 453-3513.
