Submitted by rollotomasi07071 t3_ye4g0a in newjersey
I think a large issue that is being overshadowed by second hand smoke is the toxicity of cigarette butts. Often people will think "oh its just plant and paper, it'll biodegrade" and will just drop on the ground. Just like it does to your lungs, it leaches toxic chemicals and additives into the environment. A large part of the bands on smoking is for littering and environmental protection, not just smoking around others.
Edit: Perhaps the burden of smoking trash disposal should be the responsibility of the smoker, not the state. I'm sure there's plenty of portable personal ashtrays available on the market these days. Keep it in your ashtray and hold on to it until you do see a trashcan like you would do with EVERY OTHER PIECE OF TRASH YOU WOULD HAVE. I don't eat a candy bar and just throw the trash on the ground if I don't see a trash can. If you chose to smoke you have to take responsibility for your own trash. I don't think that's asking too much.
See this doesn't have to go hand in hand. I'm calling bullshit here.
NJ is so anti smoking that they don't provide any opportunity to put the cigarette butts away. Guarantee you this would be much less of an issue if ashtrays and filters were more regularly available.
France and Japan encourage you to throw the butts in the garbage. Southeast Asia simply has ashtrays at every restaurant or bar table plus filters on hotel balconies. Much less butts are on the street because of it.
If the US implemented more of this, particularly Northern states like NJ, this would not be nearly as big of an issue.
That doesn’t track. How many people smoke in their cars and throw the cigarette out the window? Since they’re a smoker in their own vehicle, wouldn’t they know to have a trash bin in their car?
My late grandmother lived a mile from a traffic light. People would light up at the red and when they got to her place, throw the butt out the window. The first 8 feet of her lawn was nothing but cigarette butts. They were nearly impossible to get out of the grass.
People just don’t really litter in Japan to begin with. Every time I visit I am hard pressed to find any spec of trash on the ground.
Every food/drink related establishment has ashtrays because it is frowned upon heavily to ash on the ground outside. There is also usually one of those ashtray stands so a group of people can ash their cigs there and discard the butt into the garbage under the ashtray. If there isn’t one outside an establishment, people use an empty beverage container that they hold in their hand. Butts don’t get thrown on the ground, always the trash can. People smoking in their cars typically have a drink bottle filled with a bit of water and store the butts in there and then discard later.
While I disagree with the bill in the article, I don't want to foot your "proposed" bill because smokers can't properly dispose of their debris.
No public trash bins then?
No additional ashtrays/bins paid for by public money. It's not just the cost of the bin itself but then there's the cost of people to empty it, to pick up litter around it, to replace it when it eventually gets broken etc.
Literally the same logic. “I don’t like people using so many plastic bags! Remove recycling bins so plastic bags go away!” ^i ^know ^nj ^doesnt ^allow ^plastic ^bags ^anymore
I don't get it...You know you can't recycle plastic bags in any single stream recycling bin right?
Is a filter those tall skinny stack things? Because I’ve seen enough of those just slowly smoldering all day long to know they are useless and gross. They make the whole parking lot or area smell bad if someone tosses a lit butt in there. You’d take any other garbage with you, take your butts too!
> I'm sure there's plenty of portable personal ashtrays available on the market these days
You are correct, there are. I've been using one for my public forays for years since I refuse to contaminate the environment.
Well, that's on tobacco companies to actually change the formula, so to speak. No reason a cig butt shouldn't be biodegradable. That goes for ALL single use plastic items. This tragedy of the commons is a grift to put all environmental concerns on the citizen, and not the multi billionaires that could actually do something meaningful.
There should be a federal ban on cigarette filters. They are what does the damage. Some of the first successful tobacco companies sold either filterless or paper filtered cigarettes.
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