PORTSMOUTH — If Randy Matsch was trying to start a conversation about littering on Saturday, he succeeded.

Four plastic bags stuffed with thousands of cigarette butts — 250,000 to be precise — made people slow down and take a second look along Park Avenue. The bags were strategically placed on the east side of the crosswalk in front of Flo’s Clam Shack, which guaranteed some healthy foot traffic.

“The idea came years ago when I started doing this,” said Matsch, who lives nearby and is a familiar site along local roads with his pickup truck as he and his wife, Kathy, scour deep into the weeds and on beaches to keep the area clean. “I was just noticing how many cigarette butts I picked up. We continue to pick them up and count them.”

He bundled up 250,000 of them in four bags and placed them near the seawall Saturday, along with a sign that read: “It’s not just one cigarette. PLEASE think about your actions.” Included on the sign was a QR code to Matsch’s Instagram page (rlmatsch59), which documents his attempts to help Mother Nature.

“There are people following it from all overt the world and they actually communicate to each other on what’s going on in their area,” he said.

Matsch had wanted to put the cigarette butt display out earlier, but he was called away to California at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to help one of his parents, so it had to wait until now.

And yes, the 250,000 count is accurate, he insisted.

“It’s been counted. To this day, at each site my wife and I count them and add them up on my calculator,” he said, noting that Island Park Beach alone collects 300-plus butts in just a couple of days.

Matsch’s Instagram page makes it clear that butts are still being dropped at an alarming rate. 

For example on Aug. 30, while his wife escorted a family member to the doctor’s office at the Truesdale Surgical Clinic in Fall River, Matsch grabbed his gear and scoured the Stanley Street neighborhood. In a little over an hour and a half, he had collected 1,410 cigarette butts. They found 919 butts while doing cleanups on Rye Island and Long Neck Goose in Blue Bill Cove on Aug. 20.

“We have to get out of that mindset that it’s just one cigarette or it’s just one piece of litter. It’s not! And it adds up quickly,” he wrote on Instagram.

Of course, the couple pick up a lot more than just cigarette butts. On Aug. 27, before a summer music festival at Naval Station Newport, they spent more than three hours looking for sea glass and cleaning the shoreline. They didn’t find much of the former, but trash was aplenty.

“We found multiple large sheets of foam siding, lots of rope, big blocks of styrofoam, lots of plastic gallon jugs, ohhh yeah … and a car battery,” Matsch wrote on his Instagram page. 

While they collected only 17 cigarette butts, they removed a total of 129.9 pounds of debris. 

“Got a great workout because every bit of that had to be conveyed up a 30-foot steep embankment,” he said on Instagram.

Even on vacation, they’re cleaning up. “Every state we go to, we’ll try to do a little (picking up). We see things that some people just breeze by and don’t even consider. We typically go to places where people just don’t go,” said Matsch, adding that trying to help wildlife that inhabit areas littered with trash is a driving factor.

The idea behind the display, he said, was an attempt to make people think twice before they throw a butt to the ground. “Hopefully, some people may consider what they’re doing and may change things.”

‘This is really cool’

Two of the folks who gathered around Matsch’s display on Saturday were Jim Sattel and his grandson, Thomas Maynard, a high school junior who was up visiting from New Haven, Conn.

Thomas, in fact, found the display so compelling he made a short video about it for his YouTube channel, Allgamesnews.

“I was up visiting for the weekend and walking the grandparent’s dog and I happened to see the cigarettes here,” he said.

Sattel said the display did a good job in making people think about the accumulative impact of so many discarded cigarettes.

“I think it’s really cool, because on a beach that’s maybe over a mile and a half, the guy down there fishing … in his mind it’s just a grain of sand,” he said. “After a while, after you collect all these things, you can see the real possibility that there are toxins coming out of them. Plus, the kids are playing in the sand and rolling around. It starts begging questions: What are they rolling around in?”