Six people, some employees of area health departments and others teenage volunteers, spent part of Monday removing cigarette butts from the waterfront promenade on the Washington waterfront.

The six — Timothy Brown,  Kenya Servia, Michelle Johnson, Jerry Marshall, Terry Marshall and Megan Hauser — will visit other places to perform the same service. Servia is with the Craven County Health Department. Johnson is with the Nash County Health Department. Brown is with Albemarle Regional Health Services. The Marshall brothers, who attend Pamlico County Middle School, are teen volunteers.

The group plans to visit Craven County today and Nash County and Pasquotank County in the near future.

“We are part of the Tobacco Reality Unfiltered movement, which is funded by the North Carolina Health and Wellness Trust Fund,” said Hauser, who works for the Martin-Tyrrell-Washington Health District, which serves Martin, Tyrrell and Washington counties. “We are trying to raise awareness about the problem of cigarette-tobacco litter and also beautify and clean up the local area.”

She explains why the group includes teenagers.

“We recruit these young people to be part of part of the Tobacco Reality Unfiltered youth groups. They’re involved in these community-advocacy activities,” Hauser said.

For the Marshall brothers, their motivation to become TRU volunteers is simple: to advocate against smoking and try to reduce, if not eliminate, cigarette-butt litter.

“”We were actually just speaking with the folks at the Visitor Center, letting them know who we were and what we are doing out here,” Hauser said in a brief interview Monday afternoon.

Servia, in her second year with the group, said the group alerted the Visitor Center staff of its presence — “that we care about their community, and that we came from far off to pick up butts here in their community.”

For more information about TRU, visit http://www.realityunfiltered.com.