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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the health and economic benefits, the other major benefit worh noting is environmental.

In Europe I find it really hard to watch people _constantly_ throwing cigarette butts down storm water drains, into canals and doing other disgusting things, like stubbing the butts into the sand on the beach or into the soil of a river bank. I find it highly disturbing how un-aware people are about the damage being done to fragile eco-systems.

I remember walking around Rome not long ago just thinking how disgustingly dirty the city was (I love Rome btw), there was little flower gardens just over flowing with butts, butts accumulating in gutters etc.

I actually felt anxiety about it raining just knowing where it was all headed.

So yeah, it would be cool to see this happen in other places around the world.

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In the places I've lived in America the two classes of people who care the least about disposing of trash anywhere but on the ground are lottery players (I assume only the non-winners) and smokers. I see other types of litter, but nothing else nearly as regularly.

I happened to be watching a girl smoke once, and caught myself thinking, "grr, she's probably going to drop it on the ground". I realized I was being uncharitable, and just because a lot of people leave their cigarettes around doesn't mean this one person is going to.

Then she dropped it on the ground, stomped it and and walked away. It's really hard to be a generous person when others constantly prove cynicism right.

I once said to a smoker outside a laundromat as he threw the butt on the ground "you dropped something".

He replied "we'll pick it up for me then" and walked inside.

I did pick it up, entered the laundromat and threw it in to his basket of clean clothes.

Then we got in a fight, it probably wasn't worth it but it felt really good.

I really like your style.

I didn't mean to come off well in the story. It was pretty dumb and could have ended quite badly.

You're my hero...

No, totally worth it!

A fantasy of mine is to throw cigarette butts back into smokers cars when seeing them toss them out at traffic lights and in traffic.

You'll like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cVuvVRUE then.

I wish I had as much free time to do the same.

This just made my morning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thatHappened/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PeopleBeingJerks/

Hey, I'm not the guy bragging about starting fictional fights.

Their attitude seems to be "When you smoke, the whole world is an ashtray."

Here's the thing about smokers. The very act of smoking is saying "I don't care about my health". If you don't care about your own health, why would you care about the health of strangers or the environment?

bike commuting every day I am exposed to a lot of litter, from my perspective the vastly most common litter is drink containers, coffee cups in the winter, soda cups in the summer, there is really no contest, it's by far the largest amount. Plastic bags are next, then those disposable flossing plastic U-shaped things, and then all sorts of other things.

I so wish that 7-11, starbucks etc. charged $5 deposit for every drink container they sell, ah one can always dream...

Those stick around for a long time. Toss an apple and it's quickly dirt inside a week or two, toss the bag it came in and that's still mostly intact in 6 months.

Would you have said the same 30 years ago? Smoking used to be much more common - at least in places where I've lived. As smokers have quit the number of butts they have dropped have gone down. My impression is smokers in general are more likely to drop their used butts, but since there are so few of them you don't see much.

I actually felt anxiety about it raining just knowing where it was all headed.

You people scare me. Honestly. I'm not joking. What I can feel anxiety for: thinking that people can start a fight for a butt on the floor.

Making people feel guilt for using the wrong trash container, or leaving the tap open for too long. Life's too short for that crap, IMHO.

It makes me think of Demolition Man. I believed it was over the top comedy when it was released. Now I'm not taking it as a joke anymore.

Edit: I should not need to say this. But... I don't smoke. Also I don't approve people littering if they can avoid it.

Honestly, you should feel guilty. Recycling is easy; so is looking for a garbage can.

Our resources are limited. No use squandering them because "yolo".

"You"? It seems you didn't understand my previous comment. Fine. I really don't know how to explain the concept much better. It's something about not putting absolute ideas over people, including oneself. That's not to say despising common interest, but just having a little common sense.

Let me share an old story of my hometown. Public water supply pipes are a disaster in the area. I saw an official report that showed that the waste was between 20% and 40%. So, even if this is the spanish province with the most rain, we suffered from restrictions most summers. No current water from 10 PM to 10 AM.

Now two infuriating (for me, at least) cases: one nearby village spent a hefty sum repairing the pipes, so no more leaks, and a family here that installed a reservoir in the roof to have water after 10 PM. Please notice that cutting the supply is not intended to make people consume less (they do more since water is kept in buckets for the night), but to reduce the leaks to half (half time pressurized pipes).

The family was fined because they were not "solidary" with their neighbours. The rest of councils of the area made a big noise and demanded the village that had invested in infrastructure, and thus attacked the root problem, to put restrictions in place.

You might think that these stories have nothing to do with the current conversation. Maybe I should have written about the fines for not recycling while there were not recycling facilities, so everything ended in the same dumpster, or the golf fields that sucked tons of water, I don't know.

My point is what I wrote above: beware of this kind of absolute idea when they stomp over people or common sense. Do what you reasonably can to make the world a little better, but don't put the responsability to save the world on your shoulders, that's not healthy.

Well I'm also affraid by self-interested people who think that life is short, therefore, behaving selfishly is fine. Fortunately we share this world with other living organisms and juvenille humans, who deserve a healthy eco-system.

Also, the natural environment is not the wrong trash can, it's simply not a trash can at all.

I've often seen people deliberately ignore signs warning people not to use a storm water drain as a trash can. What hope do we have when people do things like that?

Also, I have no idea how we got into water restrictions, but why not?

When I went to Italy I was shocked at how much people smoked. I always thought Italians were more health conscious but more people smoked in Italy than I see in America.

The train stations were horrible. I once looked under the platform and each time a trains comes it pushes butts to one side. There were literally 10,000s or more.

It honestly doesn't seem to me that consumption in Italy is that different from other western countries (it is lower than neighboring Austria or Switzerland, for instance)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cigarette...

In addition is forbidden to smoke in public enclosed spaces (which is not a given in many countries), and it is forbidden to advertise cigarettes and tobacco.

There is in general less stigma associated to smoking than in the US, for this reason people might feel more "free" to openly smoke in places where it is not forbidden.

Cigarettes are a lot cheaper in Italy than they are in the UK, at least (a quick Google suggests cigarette prices vary wildly in the US depending on different taxes in each state).

why cannot the filters be mandated to be quickly biodegradable? We can make shipping peanuts from corn and they dissolve in water, why not the filters?

Those peanuts also desolve in your mouth.

Even better, get rid of filters entirely.

They're the only part of a rollie that isn't biodegradable - the rest being plant matter (the tobacco) and other plant matter (paper).

The taste is far better without one too, less airflow restriction, and I vaguely recall something about filtered cigs being potentially more dangerous than unfiltered ones - something to do with all the nicotine being 'stolen' by the filter (due to it settling in with the tar-resin stuff that builds up in the filter or whatever), leading people who smoke filtered fags & rollies to actually smoke more to get the "hit" they were looking for, to the point where any benefit the filter provided in the first place is completely nullified and even beyond.

You'll like Mr Trash Wheel: http://baltimorewaterfront.com/healthy-harbor/water-wheel/

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