The previously profiled beach cleaners, Danielle and Sara, led me to Mark Armen, who’s doing something so cool with his business degree that I had to write about it.
Incidentally, this train of people I’ve been profiling – Sara telling me about Danielle telling me about Mark – reminds me of that old shampoo commercial, ‘I told two friends, and then they told two friends, and then so on, and so on, and so on…’ The internet works like shampoo!
Okay, back to Mark. Growing up in Southern California, he was always out on the beach. “As a kid, at the end of the day I’d go pick up trash all by myself,” he says. “People thought I was a weirdo.”
“I went to business school with the fine focus of trying to look at how business can help the environment instead of degrading it.”
He wanted to be a marine biologist when he grew up, but when he got grown, he decided he wanted to start his own business. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, that business would be, but he knew it had to be related to the ocean. “I went to business school with the fine focus of trying to look at how business can help the environment instead of degrading it.” Challenged by that motivation, he started in his present job, “working with plastics and glass recycling, and trying to reengineer recycling in this country, because it’s broken.”
In November, when the first rains hit Los Angeles and clean off the streets, it all ends up in the ocean. It’s known as the ‘first flush.’ (see Mark’s videos below) “It’s a nightmare. You would not believe it,” he says. Two years ago, Mark was walking the beach right after that first flush, “and I was coming over little stuff – bottle caps, cigarette butts, drinking straws, tampon applicators, etc. Here I am working every day trying to recycle a big plastic bottle or an ink cartridge or a cell phone, and what I’m seeing on the beach are all the little things that get in the drain. That led me to litter research, finding out that the majority of the stuff that’s littered is less than four inches in size.”
The majority of that is cigarette butts. According to a study from Keep America Beautiful, cigarette butt litter costs our cities and businesses four billion dollars in clean-up and prevention, and those are just direct costs. 57% of all cigarette butts are littered. They make up 38% percent of litter on roadsides and washing up on the beach.
“On top of that, I read some research out of San Diego State University that the toxins in cigarette butts have the potential to kill marine life, fish in particular,” Mark notes. “That set me off because I love fish, I love the ocean, I think we need to protect it, not only ecologically but economically as well. It’s an economic driver. That got me thinking about what we can do upstream. Beach clean-ups are great; they get people behind a common purpose. That’s what Sara and Danielle do. They motivate me and propel me to do what I do. But they’ll be the first ones to tell you that it’s not the end-all solution. You’re going to get back there tomorrow morning and it’s going to be there again, unfortunately.”
Save some fish. Feed me butts.
So he created the BaitTank. With a (reused) surfboard fin on top, and friendly information on its side, the Tank attracts attention and holds thousands of butts.
“I found some research that said that attractive, salient, cigarette receptacles actually attract more litter. So much in our industry is negative. How do we make it positive?” He thought that if a littered cigarette butt can kill a fish, a collected cigarette butt could save a fish. “So instead of talking about all the water pollution, and the trillions of butts in our waterways, we can talk about the fish we’re saving by doing something about it.”
The motto he hit on: Save some fish. Feed me butts.
He pitched his “fun little back-of-the-napkin idea” around the state, and people in Santa Cruz and Capitola signed off on it. On August 1, 2010, the first BaitTank was installed.
Wrightsville beach cleaner-upper Danielle Richardet helped land some tanks in North Carolina. “The reason I like them so much is that they convey a message for people to understand why littering butts is wrong,” she says. “I think they have a higher success rate than the typical receptacle. They stick out; you want to stop and see what they’re about.” And you want to feed them.
Mark’s growing green business now has over 50 tanks installed across the country. According to the people who maintain them, not only have they decreased cigarette butt litter somewhere between 70-80%, but they’ve also educated and enhanced the community.
“People love them,” Mark enthuses. “They decrease employee workload, which is extremely difficult to put a value on but there is a value there. We used to have public works people walking around sweeping up butts. Now the public works department has even acknowledged that they can work on more important maintenance projects. This isn’t just a tree-hugging thing, this is a money thing.”
He’s even meeting with tobacco companies to get them to sign on to ‘adopting’ Tanks. “I’ve always wanted to create for profit businesses that actually help the environment. Profit can drive sustainability, not only environmental sustainability but financial sustainability. The better I do, the broader impact I can have.” One butt-saved fishie at a time.
Check out Mark’s BaitTanks & Mark’s Blog.
And here’s a great advocacy and research group: CigWaste
Mark’s “First Flush” Videos
