The Cape Town Central City Improvement District’s (CCID) “It’s time to come clean” Urban Management campaign is progressing well and has piqued the public’s interest as intended.
The 2018 campaign launched with the new message “It’s time to come clean” and began in April with a highly visual and somewhat shocking display in St Georges Mall in the Cape Town CBD. This display demonstrated what 240kg of ciggie butts, collected from the 270 CCID-branded cigarette bins in just one month, looks like.
Says Richard Beesley, manager of CCID Urban Management: “The message wasn’t an anti-smoking one, but rather a call for smokers to imagine how many more butts end up on the ground, littered illegally, and consequently in our sewage systems and quite possibly in our oceans. It’s not a pretty sight and yet so many more ciggie butts and other litter is being dumped straight onto our pavements and streets.”
The annual campaign, which will run until the end of May, is aimed at highlighting the work of the CCID’s Urban Management department as well as the contracted teams it works with, while at the same time calling on members of the public to do their part to ensure the Central City remains the cleanest CBD in South Africa. This year’s campaign targets three main problem areas, namely, illegal dumping, littering and graffiti tagging.
While the 240kgs of ciggie butts were on display for one day only, another activation during this year’s campaign looks set to become a permanent feature. Having originally been rolled out during the 2017 campaign, the CCID has once again rolled out a highly popular (and very amusing) interactive “ciggie butt voting bin” inviting smokers to engage by voting with their butts on the answers to a variety of questions, such as “Are you still saving water?” or “Following the data security breach, are you deleting Facebook?” Once again, the ciggie butt voting bin has been well-received with smokers that congregate on pavements in the CBD, particularly outside the many call centres, and has resulted in them disposing their butts in a responsible way while having a good laugh at the same time.
In addition to the in-your-face cigarette butts display and the ciggie butt voting bin, the CCID’s “It’s time to come clean” messaging is also being displayed on posters across the CBD. One of these is a “hotspot” poster, which appears whenever illegal dumping takes place, that questions whether illegal dumpers expect their mothers to clean up after them.
Richard elaborates: “We have had members of the public commenting and writing to us especially with regard to our hot spot posters as some members of the public have found these quite provocative, and even rude, and have challenged us – which is exactly what we wanted. We hope to cause the illegal dumpers as much offense as possible! They need to understand that their actions could result in fines as hefty as up to R5 000.
“The reality is that a great deal of litter continues to be dumped on the CBD’s streets every single day and removing it is both labour intensive and comes at a great cost. So, to challenge people to change behaviour for good and really drive the message home that the responsibility of a clean CBD starts with the people who use it daily, we have to constantly push the envelope. We’re pleased with the response thus far and hope the behavioural change will continue beyond the campaign.”
Images by Scott Arendse (CCID), CCID precinct manager, Carlisle Marankey (illegal dumping)