Spring Cleaning: 5 Tips to Tobacco-Free Living

April
17

Spring breathes new life into the world around us. This spring (if you call 32 degrees spring!?), we suggest you take full advantage of new life and make a clean break from tobacco exposure. Here are 5 spring-cleaning tips that will allow you, your children, your neighbors, and the entire community, breathe the freshest air possible.

Reality Check advocates from Olean High School clean up butts in their city parks. Next on their agenda: building community support to help them get a smoke-free policy.

  1. Clean Up Your Apartment
    If you live in an apartment building, ask your landlord about non-smoking policies that could clear the air in your home. Tell her or him that 65% of the air in apartment buildings is re-circulated throughout the entire building, and that without a no-smoking policy, you are breathing in your neighbor’s smoke.

  2. Clean Up Your Park, Beach, or Baseball Field
    Talk to your local Common Council or town board about making the park near you tobacco-free. Exposure to secondhand smoke in parks, beaches and other areas can be hazardous. These should be places where we can breathe fresh air and exercise without having smoke blown in our faces or butts scattered at our feet.

    Common Council Approves Smoke Free Parks

    Why smokefree #Buffalo parks is a personal battle for Common Council President Darius G Pridgen,

    Posted by Tobacco-Free Western New York on Friday, July 28, 2017

    While you’re mobilizing community members and working on a smoke-free policy, host a Butt Cleanup on Earth Day, April 22. What a great way to rid our earth of those nasty pieces of litter that release poisonous chemicals into our fresh water, as well as harm our children, pets and wildlife. 

  3. Clean Up Hollywood  Top-rated movies deliver billions of tobacco impressions to young theater audiences in the U.S. and worldwide, making it more likely for them to light up themselves. Reduce your child’s exposure to toxic on-screen tobacco imagery by demanding that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or New York State Attorney, Eric Schneiderman, R-rate future films with tobacco imagery.

  4. Clean Up Your Business
    If you’re a landlord, cleaning a smoking unit when a tenant leaves costs $4000-$15,000. Cleaning a smoke-free unit is under $1,000. By setting up a smoke free building policy, you’ll clean up your property and clean up on savings from reduced cleaning and repair costs, decreased air filtration costs and lower insurance costs.

  5. Clean Up Your School
    Want to be part of a tobacco free generation? Put together an advocacy group  at your school that will help you expose classmates and fellow teens to the truth about tobacco and tobacco industry marketing tactics, as well as clean up on teen tobacco use. We’ll help you set up and manage this group through our Reality Check program.

  6. You’ve read the 5 tips, now it’s time to clean up. But you don’t have to do it alone. Call Jenna Brinkworth at 716-845-1615 today to learn more. Or email her at Jenna.Brinkworth@roswellpark.org and she’ll connect you with everything you need in your clean movement.