Three of the five members in my immediate family smoke. My Dad, after a breast cancer scare, quit. He’s been a non-smoker for almost three years now! Yay! At eleven years old, I took my first puff on a cigarette. And fainted. Clearly, the thrill was lost on me.

Which brings me to my rant of the month. It is estimated that 4.3 trillion cigarette butts are littered each year. It takes 12 years for the filters to decompose.

It is estimated that one in five New Yorkers smoke. My guess, from random observations, is that it is probably one in four. By comparison, the San Francisco Bay area has far fewer smokers. My guess is one in ten. I have pondered the reasons for this difference, and conclude that New Yorkers think it is part of the style image, and Californians weigh in on the healthy living side of things.

I was in Napa Valley recently. Friends from New York were visiting, and one of them had tossed a cigarette butt on the ground. I didn’t see her do this, and if I had, I’m not sure I would have said anything. Why is that? A man walked up to her with the discarded butt and did his best to politely ask her not to discard cigarette butts on the street because they wind up in the creek and get washed out to San Francisco Bay. She was more than a little surprised, and a lot embarrassed. Her comment? “That would never happen in New York!” So true.

I recall the day when my parents, chain-smoking in the car with the three of us suffocating in the back seat, would open the car door and dump the overflowing ashtray on the ground. I also recall being scolded to close the window because the air conditioning was on. I couldn’t see my parents in the front seat through the blue haze of smoke.

If, at the same moment a smoker tossed a butt on the street, I tossed a candy bar wrapper on the street, I suspect they would holler at me to pick it up and toss it in the bin.

Why do smokers think it is okay to discard their butts on the ground? How about get one of these portable ashtrays?

Tags: butts, cigarettes, litter

This entry is filed under Discussion, Environment Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.