CA DEPT. OF PUBLIC HEALTH COME CLEAN
Show of hands, who likes to look at litter? Exactly. No one, especially when it’s cigarette butts. Which happens to be the most littered item on earth. But almost no one knows that. And the ones who do, Big Tobacco, has spent decades making sure the conversation stays focused on the individual smoker instead of the product. Our strategic reframe changed that: cigarette butts aren't litter, they're toxic waste. Now the blame goes where it belongs. “Come Clean” helped make a quietly ubiquitous problem visible for the first time, in part with a billboard made from 12,000 butts collected from the surrounding streets. From a distance, it’s almost art. Up close, it’s an accusation.
Don’t look away. 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded annually and purposefully designed in such a way that they will poison the environment for a decade. Who knew? Oh right. The guys who made them.
