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?

  • itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml
    1652·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • pixelscript@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      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.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
        2·
        2 hours ago

        They’re a huge source of microplastics in the environment. Tl;Dr they readily break down into microplastics and small plastic filaments.

        https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34139503/

        FTA:

        Cigarette butts are dangerous pieces of plastic, but are usually not handled properly and consist of more than 15,000 detachable strands of plastic fiber. Discarded cigarette butts may be carried into rivers and lakes, and finally into the ocean. The plastic fibers will continuously release microplastic fibers into the environment. About 300,000 tons of potential microplastic fibers may enter the aquatic environment from this source per annum. Additionally, toxic substances, such as nicotine, carcinogenic tar, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, have strong toxic effect, which will cause serious damage to aquatic organisms.

    • DashboTreeFrog@discuss.onlineEnglish
      71·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
      451·
      2 days ago

      As a former smoker who carried my cigarette butts until I found a trash can, I truly hate those assholes.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
      25·
      2 days ago

      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 …