I live in a country where smoking has generally been on the decline for a while now but even still I see thousands of cigarette butts in just about any public place. They litter the sides of the road, bus shelters, alleyways, outside clubs, bars and pubs, public toilets, park benches and just about everywhere else. Its even extending to disposable vapes now as well.
For the most part, where I live doesn’t have that much of other kinds of litter about and is generally clean. And most public bins and all smoking areas have ashtrays and dedicated cigarette bins so it wouldn’t be hard to dispose of them properly like any other piece of rubbish and even then there’s often cigarette butts within sight of the bins and ashtrays.
Why then do people have a completely different approach for cigarettes?
They don’t consider it littering. That the cigarette butt will somehow just magically degrade like a fallen leaf. It truly is remarkable how selfish smokers can be.
Honest question: what about cigarette butts makes them not biodegradable, exactly? To my vague understanding of what they’re made of, I know them to be cheifly comprised of paper and extract from dried leaves. Even after considering all the other additive compounds in cigs added for taste and effect, I can’t picture a lot of it by mass being forever chemicals like plastics.
That asked, I’m not convinced littering is acceptable even for biodegradable things. Far from all “biodegradable” materials completely disintegrate on a short timescale. Even IF cigarette butts degrade like plain paper and dry leaves, they wouldn’t do it quickly. If it’s a place where even a single smoker haunts multiple times a week, smoking and discarding multiple cigs at a time, they can pile up faster than they disappear.
And that’s not even considering all the toxins that would leech out from the things that will remain at elevated levels for as long as the littering continued.
My first time hearing the word “biodegradable” as a kid was after asking my dad why he threw his cigarette butts into the water when we were fishing.
As a former smoker who carried my cigarette butts until I found a trash can, I truly hate those assholes.
At least some of them probably genuinely believe that, and AFAIK it is more or less true for filterless butts. Maybe we should replace some of the gore pics we have on cigarette packets with information about environmental effects …
Like how birds collect the butts and use them to prevent parasites in their nests?
more like how many animals eat then and get poisoned.
Yeah, that too.