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?
If they don’t care about polluting their own bodies, why would they care about littering?
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Hey that’s an awesome story, thank you for posting. I’ve found I inherited a lot of bad habits as well, that I never thought about until confronted later in life. Always gotta be willing to make a positive change
Have you ever heard of “broken window syndrome?” It’s the idea that once there are a couple of broken windows on buildings in an area, quickly more will start getting broken. But if every window is intact, you will only get the occasional vandal being bold enough to break the first one.
It’s not scientific and may not even have any truth in it, but there is something to be said for the idea that if people see others doing something, they are more likely to go ahead and do it themselves.
To the point: if you see thousands of butts everywhere, smokers do too and probably consider it normal by now, and don’t care.
This only explains how things go from bad to worse. So who drops the first butt? Well: it’s the most selfish, lazy, inconsiderate guy around. There always is one.
Funny how all this adds up to the fact that we will inevitably herd behind the worst person around. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad as a species.
If you want a happier example, there’s the trash in Wisconsin state parks. The Dept. of Natural Resources used to place trash receptacles in our state parks, and haul the trash away. That worked, people put their trash in the bins, because that’s the social expectation.
But the DNR lacked the staff to keep up with the trash. Sometimes animals would get in and spread trash around, but mostly, people would pile trash on or around cans and dumpsters after they’d filled up. If that’s where you put your trash, that’s where you put your trash, right?
So, the DNR simply stopped putting trash receptacles in the parks altogether, and announced that you’d have to pack your own trash out. And it worked! Without a socially-sanctioned place to deposit trash in the park, people pack it out. (Mostly. Humans are still essentially animals, so various detritus gets dropped, but no garbage bags full of food scraps left on the ground for the raccoons.)
While I’ve not had the chance to visit your amazing national parks yet, I understand that they’re an experience and a proper visit type of outing. I can see how that would work there because you’d hope most people visiting have made a conscious decision to go into nature, are prepared for it etc. I’m not sure a similar strategy would work in normal areas where people just exist, there I definitely think easy access to triaged trash cans is best.
I hear ya. I just wanted to provide an example in which social norms lead people to do the right thing.
Maybe not the best example to use a racist police practice
I’m aware of the problematic policing.
The point being made here is “we feel license to do things we see lots of other people doing, and we hesitate to do things that we don’t see anyone else doing.”
This point can be made without dragging us into the racist policing. If you know a better name for it, by all means suggest one.
I don’t think using propaganda to try to explain reality is healthy.
Thanks for replying so i can block you
Eat shit and farewell.
Ron Popeil died before he could invent a pocket ashtray.
They exist. They’re basically just plastic pouches, although they have small metal ones as well
Yeah I don’t get it either. I smoke and I’ve never thrown a cigarette on the ground in my life. It’s a shitty habit and you should try to at least not be a pig about it. I make my apprentices pick them up when I see them do it.
Are you a wizard?
No. I’m a carpenter. All carpenters aren’t wizards, it was just that Jesus feller.
Not “just”. But damn, he was good and left a grimoire.
He was a lich. He had necromancy mastered so well that he raised himself.
He referenced Thoth. Just saying.
Jumping in to say I quit smoking after 25ish years on New Year’s Eve and have not faltered at all. It was (for me at least) really easy when you truly want to.
I will 100% have a solitary joint on my birthday in May, though.
Most of my family are smokers, and I can tell you that smokers are often just annoying and selfish when it comes to their smoking.
My dad and stepmom insist on smoking at the fireplace because ‘the smoke goes to the chimney’ (hint: it doesn’t) despite the fact that a 9 year old lives here, and I remember when my brother dropped his cigarette on the ground in a forest (he put it out first) and when I noted that he shouldn’t do that because animals will eat the cigarette butts he drops, since there was a nest with baby birds nearby, his defense was that the birds in the city eat cigarettes and get addicted to them, this was somehow fine or something. I still fail to see the logic there, if he had any.
In addition to other suggestions, which are likely largely correct, I’ll pose another potential factor:
Smoking is self-harm, in addition to addiction. Some people are too fucked up on depression and self-loathing to see their impact on the world around them.
I guess you can’t keep a cigarette butt in your pocket or purse like you can with a snack wrapper. Which forces people to dump them. Which creates a really bad habit, I mean you been tossing that shit yesterday when you didn’t find a bin, why should you care today? This is not an excuse though, just an attempt to understand the behavior which is what you’re asking
Portablepocket ashtrays. Very common in some places
I don’t notice this in my country. Most bins have a cigarette bin attached and most smokers don’t just light up anywhere. It’s water bottles here instead.
If someone doesn’t care about themselves, why would they care about other or littering.
Well, I don’t think there’s a single answer.
I used to be a smoker. And it always pissed me off how cavalier other smokers were about just flicking a butt anywhere.
Having discussed it many times with other smokers, I gotta say the major reason for out is pure fucking laziness combined when apathy. People just don’t care, or think it doesn’t matter, and aren’t willing to put even the tiniest effort into not being assholes.
The next major reason is that smoking is basically burning a plant. There’s already a factor where you’re dropping ash, so there’s a predisposition to forgetting there’s a difference. And some people seem to think that because the cig was burning that it shouldn’t go in regular trash. Those folks are usually pretty good about using public ashtrays with a dedicated disposal container. Not all of them all the time, but more often than not.
I’m not saying I never left a butt behind (I love that phrase), but for me it was only when circumstances made it such that I wasn’t paying attention. High stress circumstances, and I wouldn’t be paying attention to what my hands were doing. I’d be done smoking, walking back to wherever and realize I didn’t have the butt with me.
There are portable options. My car didn’t come with an ashtray, but there are portable ones that cost less than a pack of cigarettes, even back when cigarettes were cheaper. There’s are also ones you can carry in a pocket or purse. I used to carry one in my pocket that was great because it was sealed well enough that you couldn’t smell anything from it.
But, barring a rare situation where the residual ember is too dangerous to stub out and then dispose of the little bit of tobacco left with a certainty of safety, there’s really zero excuse to not do that and at least carry your butt away to a receptacle of some kind, even if you’re in your own yard. But if things are that flammable, you shouldn’t be smoking to begin with.
Back when I would work the door as a bouncer at bars and clubs, I was kinda known for being pissy about it. I’d be smoking myself, see someone toss a butt and give them shit for it. “Why you fucking up my parking lot? Pick your shit up.” Benefit of being a bouncer and looking like a bouncer is you can get away with that kind of thing. Like, motherfucker, I’m standing right here next to a giant ashtray with a disposal bucket for the butts. Don’t just drop your trash. My boss at the one place said I was scaring customers. I said good, now the place won’t look trashy, and you can get customers that aren’t lazy assholes that leave the parking lot littered up. Besides, if a bouncer can’t put a little fear into lazy assholes, why do the job? That’s practically part of the benefits of the job lol.
But, yeah, the vast majority are lazy assholes. Not just the smokers, it’s anyone with something small enough they don’t think it’s worth any effort to dispose of properly. A single napkin, straws, straw wrappers, toothpicks. Cigs are just more frequent because smokers go through then in bigger numbers, so they pile up more obviously.
To add to this, it’s also modeled in our media.
Characters be flicking them everywhere, pitching them to the ground and decisively tamping them out with their foot, because that is what being cool and tough is about. The only time someone is depicted properly disposing of a cigarette is if there’s an ash tray they smish it in, preferably next to a glass of hard liquor or a beer.
How often do you see somewhere to put a cigarette butt? Sure people are selfish and lazy but if there was somewhere to put them in public spaces they would be used. People who smoke in the car and toss them out the window are dickheads though
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.
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.
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.
Where I live public ashtrays are very common in public places. The littering is not as bad as it could be (used to be worse before public ashtrays were common), but lots of people still litter in those areas.
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.
I don’t often see any public bins where I have lived
When I smoked cigs, I was literally always the only person who’d always bother to properly throw away butts, even got a psuedo MGS4 style cigarette butt container for when no buttcans or trash cans were nearby.
A few people I’d smoke with would follow my lead.
Most of them just saw me giving a shit about trashing them properly and tell me to go fuck myself, fagg*t, etc.
Why are most smokers so frivolous, entitled and agressive with littering?
They don’t give a fuck.
About their own health, or anyone else’s, or the environment.
…
Other comments are saying smokers think the filters, the butts, are biodegradeable.
They aren’t.
You can only use that excuse if you’re rolling rollies or spliffs, or tapping out a spent pipe.
You can only use that excuse if you’re rolling rollies or spliffs
Even then, don’t be an asshole and just find a garbage can
Most of them just saw me giving a shit about trashing them properly and tell me to go fuck myself, fagg*t, etc.
Doing the right thing is a personal attack against people who want to feel okay about doing the wrong thing.
Ah, that old pattern. Damn. I recognize it and see it way too much around. Luckily not much in my inner circles, but spaces I can’t avoid like work for example. It’s starting to eat up on me.
This is one of those weirdly specific pet peeves I have. For the life of me I can not get into the headspace where that is the outcome of the whole chain of logic and intuition that goes into having that stance, and, more importantly, holding to it despite ample chances, throughout tens of years, to change your mind or act differently. At 50, I see you’re still lashing out in this pattern? But why, man, why?
Surely it ought to feel good to see others doing the right thing, so it wouldn’t feel as bad for yourself to do the wrong thing. Assuming you can’t just stop doing it (Many habits are extremely hard to kick, so that’s entirely human and understandable, not faulting anyone for that). But this way, the total amount of good is better when it’s only you doing the wrong thing, so you can just be the margin of error, sort of? Have less of a negative impact overall. Be implicitly slightly better yourself, by this grace of others. Or at least you should end up feeling that way, or something along those lines, right? Or at the very least, feel just nothing, be entirely oblivious to the whole thing. That’d be human and understandable too. It’s a habit. You don’t necessarily think about those. You just do them.
But to lash out for that? Be conscious enough to realize this all, but instead of any other kind of understandable human way, you, of all things, lash out to those doing the different thing. I just can’t figure it out. Why? I suppose it could be a subconscious coping mechanism to shield one’s self from the fact that they are not doing the right thing, but it feels off that it would come out aggressive or you know combative some way. At others, at least. I get that you might feel bad, and “guilty”, sort of, but surely nobody’s mind goes from “I feel guilty” to “it’s your fault I’m feeling guilty”? Ugh.
I find my lack of perspective often very anxiousness-inducing. I can emphatise with such a wide range of lives and beings and situations, but there are so many I simply can’t, often similar to this specific thing. Makes me nervous about me potentially being selfish or stubborn because I can’t see it. This is one of those things. Makes me sweat, almost. Always reminds me of the “are we the baddies?” meme. Am I partially some sort of a sociopath since I just can’t grasp that mindset? What if I don’t even really emphatise with anyone, I just think I do, but what if it feels different for those that really do it? What if I am a psychopath, goddamnit, this really gets me spiraling 🥲
Drag very often gets called a troll on Lemmy for using different pronouns than most people.
A troll is someone who tries to upset other people. Why would using different pronouns upset others?
Drag will tell you why: because a lot of people have already made up their mind to misgender drag because they don’t respect different pronouns. But in their hearts they do know right from wrong. So they feel guilty. And that’s the bad feeling. They think drag is intentionally trying to make them do the wrong thing and feel guilty.
It’s ridiculous.
Most of them just saw me giving a shit about trashing them properly and tell me to go fuck myself, fagg*t, etc.
What, just from seeing you not litter? That’s insane.
Yes.
I would just properly bin the butts, then I would be derided for this.
I wasn’t evangelizing, I wasn’t starting the discussion.
I would just do basic non littering, and would routinely be mocked for this.
That is how absurdly insecure and aggressive most (not literally all, but most) other smokers I’ve encountered or known are.
It depends. Some people grew up tossing them and old habits die hard. That was less of an issue when it was some paper and leaf, but definitely more of an issue today with filters and such. In places where there’s more enforcement, people tend to carry pocket ashtrays and actually clean up after themselves. Improving enforcement and education would probably help reduce littering.
Back many moons ago when I smoked I preferred unfiltered Lucky Strikes. I generally put them in ash trays anywhere I could find one, but if one wasn’t available in the vicinity I had no qualms with dropping it and giving it a smash and twist with my whole to put it out and effectively destroy it. One rain, or even just a good fog, and it no longer existed. I agree I think this habit was continued when filters came into fashion and it’s just not equivalent at all.
