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 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!