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Smokers have the most opportunities to litter.
I imagine few people create garbage multiple times a day while outside. The people who do only litter if they can't be bothered to find a bin, so they probably rarely visit that particular place. So smokers, teenagers and truckers just have more opportunities to litter, leaving butts, wrappers and cans.
And once you're used to littering when there's no bin, you do it when there are bins as well.
I think this is partially just observational bias.
You only notice the smokers littering and not the ones squeezing the cherry out and pocketing the filter or throwing it away.
A lot of smokers do the above and if you ever meet them they smell next level disgusting. Their car ash tray will be full of butts, and there car will reek. They often just skoke inside, and their entire living space smells of stale tobacco. Their pants will reek because they store them in their pocket until they find a bin. But they don't litter. The people who are trying to avoid smelling like an ash tray are the ones littering.
You see more of these people in places like California due to the fire risks. Back when I smoked I moved to SF and was surprised the first time I put a butt out in the ground. some random person came up to me and politely asked that I never do that again and to always extinguish the butt on the metal trash can and squeeze out the cherry. That wasn't the norm on the East Coast which didnt have wildfires at the time.
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.
There's a guy at work who would squat down and chain-smoke outside the building main entrance and littered cigarette butts all over the place.
I confronted him about it one day, and asked him to throw his butts away. Now he smokes by his car and that area of the parking lot is full of cigarette butts.
Fucking disgusting.
Cigarette butts are a huge source of microplastics in the environment. All my homies are judging that guy.
They don't see it as litter.
If someone doesn't care about themselves, why would they care about other or littering.
Because smokers are usually selfish assholes. And not terribly bright.
Ron Popeil died before he could invent a pocket ashtray.
Somehow they seem to think that one small cigarette butt is so insignificant that it doesn't matter despite the fact that they can see these small cigarette butts literally everywhere.
No drop of rain blames themselves for the flood. No snowflake blames themselves for the avalanche.
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.
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.
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.
Of course they contain their own plastic... how am I not surprised...
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.
“You’re biodegradable kid, so don’t ask so many questions”
As a former smoker who carried my cigarette butts until I found a trash can, I truly hate those assholes.
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.
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 🥲
The fact that you're thinking about others' perspectives at all is a good sign. Sometimes, when I can't understand the mindset of someone toxic and I get frustrated, I take a step back and consider what would happen if I did start thinking like them. The fact that it's difficult to imagine goes to show that I'm wired against certain shitty mindsets. It sounds like you are, too.
In trying to understand others, you're showing more thought and empathy than a lot of people bother to practice. It's frustrating and can be confusing at times, but you're not broken for being unable to view things through the eyes of someone that doesn't care about doing the right thing.
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
Maybe it's because smokers already have to make the decision to blow toxic smoke around where other people (most of them non-smokers nowadays) are likely to breathe it in - it's pretty much an inherently anti-social activity nowadays, so the step to littering your smoking trash isn't that big. Maybe related to broken window theory?
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.
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.
Because it generally takes a certain type of person to smoke and there happens to be quite a lot of overlap with the type of person who's fine with 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.
