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Cigarette Butts - Tiny Trash That Piles Up - NYTimes.com:
Now, what the articles *doesn't* talk about is the worse practice than even just throwing it on the ground and stepping on it - the practice of just tossing the still lit butt out of an open car window at 75mph on the freeway, especially on a drought year in the middle of California brushland. One family (it's rumored) lost everything in their trailer on their way to Pennsic a few years ago due to a butt landing in it and catching fire to a sheet.
Andrea Scott says she would never throw a candy wrapper on the ground.I used to walk from my apartment in Harrisonburg to the Pondo by way of a back road (Country Club Rd) to avoid the worst of the US 33 traffic and noise (as well as the pedestrian-unfriendly interstate cloverleaf), and found zillions of butts on the side of the road, outnumbering the grains of sand.
“Littering is one of my pet peeves, and I always told my kids they’d be in big trouble if I catch them doing it,” said Ms. Scott, a 43-year-old financial executive, as she sat outside an office tower on Michigan Avenue in Chicago on a recent sunny afternoon. “I see people throw stuff out their car windows, and I cringe.”
Yet she confesses that she routinely discards cigarette butts on the sidewalk.
For her and countless other American smokers, cigarette butts are an exception to the no-littering rule. “Aren’t cigarettes biodegradable?” volunteered Libby Moustakas, a co-worker who was enjoying a smoking break with Ms. Scott.
But dozens of municipalities across the nation have had enough. Weary of the butts’ unsightliness and the costs of sweeping them up, cities have passed bans on smoking on beaches and playgrounds. In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom said last week that he would go a step further, seeking a 33-cents-a-pack tax to cover the $11 million that the city spends annually to remove cigarette litter.
Nationally, cigarette butts account for one-quarter or more of the items tossed onto streets and other roadways, San Francisco and other cities report.
Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom, described this as a predictable outcome of poor product design. “There is no good practical way of dealing with cigarettes,” he said. “You have a fiery object in your hand and so you have to throw it down and crush it under your heel. And then we have to clean it up.”
Now, what the articles *doesn't* talk about is the worse practice than even just throwing it on the ground and stepping on it - the practice of just tossing the still lit butt out of an open car window at 75mph on the freeway, especially on a drought year in the middle of California brushland. One family (it's rumored) lost everything in their trailer on their way to Pennsic a few years ago due to a butt landing in it and catching fire to a sheet.
