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?
I think this is a big part of it, but it’s also our mentality – in Japan, there are hardly any public garbage bins. Yet there’s hardly any litter.
At least from what I’ve seen in North America, people seem to think it’s someone else’s problem that there’s no garbage bin. But that’s not an excuse.
Well, you can’t just blindly throw cigarette butts in the garbage. You’ll start fires. Maybe not if you’re paying attention, but if you’re smoking outside 5x a day you’re bound to slip up eventually. You can only really put them in those specialized cigarette things, which there aren’t that many of
You’ve gotta strip it first. When my buddy came back from the military he taught me to roll it around in the fingers until the remaining tobacco falls out, then the trash goes into the pocket until a bin is found.
Although, there’s not a class on that at all. I did my fair share of littering as a smoker. I still feel shit about it, which is why I bring my picker upper stick and an empty bucket with me on walks. It comes back full every time. Water bottles everywhere.
That’s what I do. Flick the tip and carry the butt to a garbage can.
In the US a sizable chunk of the population watched those anti littering campaigns and said “you’re not the boss of me!” then made it a point to litter more. You tell an American what to do and you’ve got a 50/50 chance that they’ll do the opposite purely out of spite, even if they otherwise agree with you.
I hate this place more and more every day.