Dear Editor,

I am a concerned citizen and a member of the executive board of Keep Troup Beautiful. As most of you know, KTB is the local arm of Keep Georgia Beautiful. Our mission is to educate the public on the three “R’s, recycle, reuse and reduce.

We just finished a litter survey of Troup County, and we discovered that we have made progress with our litter index being better than in prior years.

We will publish our findings at a later date. This past Saturday we held an event. Our members, along with County Commissioner Robert English, collected trash on Davis Road to Young Mills Road. We found it to be a reasonably clean area but still collected several bags of trash and other odd objects.

What I found most alarming was the number of cigarette butts we picked up.

If cigarette butts were dollar bills, we could all make a sizable contribution to our retirement funds. Cigarette butts are not biodegradable.

The butt of a cigarette is primarily the filter, made of a type of plasticized cellulose acetate. A typical cigarette butt can take anywhere from 18 months to 10 years to decompose, depending on conditions. Cigarette butts are small, but together they are unsightly and clog up our waterways.

There are other facts about cigarette butts that you can find on Keep America Beautiful’s website. We advertise Lagrange and Troup county as a great place to live, work and do business. Litter devaluates our property and our businesses. All I asked is for everyone to take a personal responsibility to practice the three “R”s and clean up behind themselves.

The Great American Cleanup is just around the corner. We ask individuals and groups to have a cleanup or beautification project in the area of your choosing. Contact KTB at Director@keeptroupbeautiful.org for more details. Let’s remember to leave Lagrange better than we found it.

Howard Mingo
LaGrange