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?
Most of my family are smokers, and I can tell you that smokers are often just annoying and selfish when it comes to their smoking.
My dad and stepmom insist on smoking at the fireplace because ‘the smoke goes to the chimney’ (hint: it doesn’t) despite the fact that a 9 year old lives here, and I remember when my brother dropped his cigarette on the ground in a forest (he put it out first) and when I noted that he shouldn’t do that because animals will eat the cigarette butts he drops, since there was a nest with baby birds nearby, his defense was that the birds in the city eat cigarettes and get addicted to them, this was somehow fine or something. I still fail to see the logic there, if he had any.
There’s a guy at work who would squat down and chain-smoke outside the building main entrance and littered cigarette butts all over the place.
I confronted him about it one day, and asked him to throw his butts away. Now he smokes by his car and that area of the parking lot is full of cigarette butts.
Fucking disgusting.
They don’t see it as litter.
Because smokers are usually selfish assholes. And not terribly bright.
If someone doesn’t care about themselves, why would they care about other or littering.
Ron Popeil died before he could invent a pocket ashtray.
They exist. They’re basically just plastic pouches, although they have small metal ones as well
Somehow they seem to think that one small cigarette butt is so insignificant that it doesn’t matter despite the fact that they can see these small cigarette butts literally everywhere.
No drop of rain blames themselves for the flood. No snowflake blames themselves for the avalanche.
When I smoked cigs, I was literally always the only person who’d always bother to properly throw away butts, even got a psuedo MGS4 style cigarette butt container for when no buttcans or trash cans were nearby.
A few people I’d smoke with would follow my lead.
Most of them just saw me giving a shit about trashing them properly and tell me to go fuck myself, fagg*t, etc.
Why are most smokers so frivolous, entitled and agressive with littering?
They don’t give a fuck.
About their own health, or anyone else’s, or the environment.
…
Other comments are saying smokers think the filters, the butts, are biodegradeable.
They aren’t.
You can only use that excuse if you’re rolling rollies or spliffs, or tapping out a spent pipe.
You can only use that excuse if you’re rolling rollies or spliffs
Even then, don’t be an asshole and just find a garbage can
Most of them just saw me giving a shit about trashing them properly and tell me to go fuck myself, fagg*t, etc.
What, just from seeing you not litter? That’s insane.
Yes.
I would just properly bin the butts, then I would be derided for this.
I wasn’t evangelizing, I wasn’t starting the discussion.
I would just do basic non littering, and would routinely be mocked for this.
That is how absurdly insecure and aggressive most (not literally all, but most) other smokers I’ve encountered or known are.
Maybe it’s because smokers already have to make the decision to blow toxic smoke around where other people (most of them non-smokers nowadays) are likely to breathe it in - it’s pretty much an inherently anti-social activity nowadays, so the step to littering your smoking trash isn’t that big. Maybe related to broken window theory?
Came here to comment on how smokers seem to congregate specifically around doors to public buildings (businesses, hotels, restaurants, ect) despite having had legislation for years that requires them to be anywhere from 5-10 metres from any inlet to a building (air vent, hvac, door, window, etc)
Oh it gets worse than that.
Many times I’ve attempted, and failed, to get a group of smokers (that I was a part of) to move away from a nat gas pump/valve that even my smoker self could smell to be leaking.
Have you ever heard of “broken window syndrome?” It’s the idea that once there are a couple of broken windows on buildings in an area, quickly more will start getting broken. But if every window is intact, you will only get the occasional vandal being bold enough to break the first one.
It’s not scientific and may not even have any truth in it, but there is something to be said for the idea that if people see others doing something, they are more likely to go ahead and do it themselves.
To the point: if you see thousands of butts everywhere, smokers do too and probably consider it normal by now, and don’t care.
This only explains how things go from bad to worse. So who drops the first butt? Well: it’s the most selfish, lazy, inconsiderate guy around. There always is one.
Funny how all this adds up to the fact that we will inevitably herd behind the worst person around. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad as a species.
Maybe not the best example to use a racist police practice
If you want a happier example, there’s the trash in Wisconsin state parks. The Dept. of Natural Resources used to place trash receptacles in our state parks, and haul the trash away. That worked, people put their trash in the bins, because that’s the social expectation.
But the DNR lacked the staff to keep up with the trash. Sometimes animals would get in and spread trash around, but mostly, people would pile trash on or around cans and dumpsters after they’d filled up. If that’s where you put your trash, that’s where you put your trash, right?
So, the DNR simply stopped putting trash receptacles in the parks altogether, and announced that you’d have to pack your own trash out. And it worked! Without a socially-sanctioned place to deposit trash in the park, people pack it out. (Mostly. Humans are still essentially animals, so various detritus gets dropped, but no garbage bags full of food scraps left on the ground for the raccoons.)
I was a smoker for about 20 years and quit in 2021 with Chantix.
For all but the last maybe 5 years of that, I just had cigarette butts on my mental whitelist. I was an otherwise very litter-conscious person who just didn’t consider butts litter because…? I never reasoned it out, and was like I suddenly realized I was fucking littering and then I became hyper sensitive about it.
It took me over ten years to realize this too, although I was young and stupid so it kind of follows. I started carrying a bag with a seal with me and if there wasn’t a public ash tray in view, I’d just drop them in there and I was so ashamed when I first started that, since it was so easy and all the things I thought would be problems, like the smell, just… literally never was. And how quickly the bag would fill up, ugh. All that used to go to the ground. Note however that I was conscious of littering and always if I knew there was an ash tray, say, no more than some 100m detour from my current path, I’d just take the extra steps to put it there. But they are surprisingly rare, especially towards the end of my smoking habit, when smoking started to really die out and be a lot less common. A lot of places, like bars for example, didn’t necessarily put ash trays by the door or terrace, which was how it used to be.
I’m lucky I got out of the habit. But I can sort of emphatise those who do it without thinking about it, especially if they are young.
Younger generations are also lucky, at least here, since smoking is so ludicrously expensive nowadays with the taxes and all, and add to that good education, I very rarely see young people smoking anymore. Seems to be mostly people in their 30s or 40s — my age group — and of us, mostly the “hillbilly” types.
I do use nicotine pouches though, to this day. Low nicotine ones, but anyway. Those are very natural for not trashing, like the Nordic snus, since the pucks/containers come with its own small compartment for the used pouches, that’s easy to clean up at home. And those pucks are very recyclable too (granted that the region has the sort of plastic sorting that differentiates washable/directly reusable containers like we do for glass) which at least from what I have seen, gets done properly a lot of the time.
In general, I think the newer generations are much more aware of all this and do a great job of being conscious of the environment, not only at the global scale, but also just the local environment and surroundings too.
Let’s just hope we didn’t fuck up bad enough so that they might have a chance at adulthood and actually transferring all that to more effective and serious politics and activism. We might just get saved ourselves, too, if they just learn to be decisive enough to push us fuckups out of the picture. God I hope enough of them have the dreams, passion and idealism to actually have that drive and fire.
This became a random tangent, sorry if you got this far!
Because it generally takes a certain type of person to smoke and there happens to be quite a lot of overlap with the type of person who’s fine with littering.
I.e. If they don’t care about themselves, why would they care about anyone else or the environment around them?
Precisely. And I’d argue that secondhand smoke and its effects already applies as not caring about others or the general environment.
Well, I don’t think there’s a single answer.
I used to be a smoker. And it always pissed me off how cavalier other smokers were about just flicking a butt anywhere.
Having discussed it many times with other smokers, I gotta say the major reason for out is pure fucking laziness combined when apathy. People just don’t care, or think it doesn’t matter, and aren’t willing to put even the tiniest effort into not being assholes.
The next major reason is that smoking is basically burning a plant. There’s already a factor where you’re dropping ash, so there’s a predisposition to forgetting there’s a difference. And some people seem to think that because the cig was burning that it shouldn’t go in regular trash. Those folks are usually pretty good about using public ashtrays with a dedicated disposal container. Not all of them all the time, but more often than not.
I’m not saying I never left a butt behind (I love that phrase), but for me it was only when circumstances made it such that I wasn’t paying attention. High stress circumstances, and I wouldn’t be paying attention to what my hands were doing. I’d be done smoking, walking back to wherever and realize I didn’t have the butt with me.
There are portable options. My car didn’t come with an ashtray, but there are portable ones that cost less than a pack of cigarettes, even back when cigarettes were cheaper. There’s are also ones you can carry in a pocket or purse. I used to carry one in my pocket that was great because it was sealed well enough that you couldn’t smell anything from it.
But, barring a rare situation where the residual ember is too dangerous to stub out and then dispose of the little bit of tobacco left with a certainty of safety, there’s really zero excuse to not do that and at least carry your butt away to a receptacle of some kind, even if you’re in your own yard. But if things are that flammable, you shouldn’t be smoking to begin with.
Back when I would work the door as a bouncer at bars and clubs, I was kinda known for being pissy about it. I’d be smoking myself, see someone toss a butt and give them shit for it. “Why you fucking up my parking lot? Pick your shit up.” Benefit of being a bouncer and looking like a bouncer is you can get away with that kind of thing. Like, motherfucker, I’m standing right here next to a giant ashtray with a disposal bucket for the butts. Don’t just drop your trash. My boss at the one place said I was scaring customers. I said good, now the place won’t look trashy, and you can get customers that aren’t lazy assholes that leave the parking lot littered up. Besides, if a bouncer can’t put a little fear into lazy assholes, why do the job? That’s practically part of the benefits of the job lol.
But, yeah, the vast majority are lazy assholes. Not just the smokers, it’s anyone with something small enough they don’t think it’s worth any effort to dispose of properly. A single napkin, straws, straw wrappers, toothpicks. Cigs are just more frequent because smokers go through then in bigger numbers, so they pile up more obviously.
To add to this, it’s also modeled in our media.
Characters be flicking them everywhere, pitching them to the ground and decisively tamping them out with their foot, because that is what being cool and tough is about. The only time someone is depicted properly disposing of a cigarette is if there’s an ash tray they smish it in, preferably next to a glass of hard liquor or a beer.
they mistakenly believe that the cigarette butts will biodegrade fast enough to not be an issue.
also they don’t care that much
If they don’t care about polluting their own bodies, why would they care about littering?
