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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.

Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.

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What does the seller do with it, then? There has to be some sort of sequestration program, possibly involving landfills - but a mass of cigarette butts is likely to produce runoff that's toxic to plants and insects, at the very least, if not to everything in its path. So, if you have a multiple-stream recycling program, you probably need to add a stream to that specifically for butts; if you have a single-stream program, I hope your sorters are getting hazard pay already, and if they aren't then they sure should be now. And you still have the sequestration problem from here - all you've accomplished is to make it minimally possible to implement that. And all of this costs, and everything downstream of it will cost, too.

Cheaper and simpler just to ban cigarettes entirely. And I realize that's neither simple nor cheap! But it's not the worst idea I've ever heard, either. Even back when I smoked every day, I wasn't entirely against it; now that I smoke only when drunk, I favor it considerably more. Yeah, it sucks to go cold turkey, but nicotine isn't like ethanol; quitting cold turkey makes you miserable for a while, but it's not going to kill anyone.

A lot of recycling in the US is done with slave labor that already violates workplace safety, so I'm not sure they'd care about adding cigarette butts to single stream programs[1]

[1]http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/doj-iog-unicor-violati...

I like the idea.. it is tricky to get right though. Cigarette butts smell a lot, so if smokers started carrying around 20 butts in their pack at work/home, non-smokers would not like it. Its hard to imagine modifying a pack cheaply enough to contain the smell.

Would it smell worse than the smell the smoker already carries? I suppose it might, since some smokers are pretty careful not to get the smoke on their clothing. (You can still smell their lungs for like 5-10 minutes afterwards, though.)

(And... sorry to any smokers reading this. Not trying to shame you, but I want to be realistic about whether this would work or not.)

Yes - a lot worse. And, yes, I know that's saying a lot. Another way to put it is that the only time I ever didn't find spent butts to reek was back when I was smoking three packs a day and couldn't smell anything.

Ouch, fair enough.

You can get pocket ashtrays for use when hiking or skiing. I don't smoke so don't know whether they smell or not.

The tax could help reduce the number of butts that are thrown away in wilderness areas too.

In Europe where people get their deposit back for bottles, the homeless (interestingly, not just them, a study in Germany said it also gave bored pensioners something to do) look in trash cans to find bottles to return. I remember reading an experiment where a city (I think in Canada) implemented a trial program to give people 6 cents per cigarette butt: they spent the money marked for the returns quicker than expected because the homeless people collected butts diligently.

It's a bit of a crazy world to make the homeless clean up pollution other people make, but even without this program there are (and will) still be homeless people...

> It's a bit of a crazy world to make the homeless clean up pollution other people make

(Presumably) Refundable deposits don't mandate the homeless do anything. Their desires simply align with the goals of the program.

I'd imagine public ashtrays be pillaged, as they are now to recycle the half smoked tobacco rests. Bad idea.

Who cares if public ashtrays are "pillaged"?

If only we could make air tight containers of some sort.

I agree these would be great. You make them different sizes and stackable! You might even be able to store food in your cigarette smell containers if you made them big enough. Why has no one come up with resealable airtight containers?

I agree, but have to point out that non-smokers not liking disgusting smells has never stopped smokers before.

Pocket ashtrays are a normal part of smoking etiquette in Japan.

I think it would be even simpler to mandate cigarette filters are biodegradable, made from cotton or something.

That’s not really feasible considering that many filters are made partly from activated carbon in order to filtrate many of the harmful substances that are in cigarettes.

Have you seen the prices people pay on this? They'd throw the money out of the window without second thoughts. They do with deposit cans already.

it's all fun and games until someone figures out they can make cigarette butts and turn them in for money

Wouldn’t be the first time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

considering people aren't making bottles/cans to game beverage container deposit programs, I don't think it's going to be that big of an issue.

One guy [1] manipulated a bottle return machine to get a cash out of some 40,000€. He prevented the machine from shredding the bottle, so he could return it 180,000 times.

[1] (German only) http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/koeln-betrueger-erbeut...

I think one of the problems with this idea (which I do find really interesting) is that this type of legislation encourages people the smoke more responsibly rather than encourage people not to smoke, which is what most legislation aims to do in regards to cigarettes. Most likely the thing that would be passed would be a $0.20 tax per butt to pay for clean up and incentivize people to stop smoking.

Or try and train birds [0]. Bird feed is cheap.

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/startups/news/a2...

That would make sense if you could meaningfully recycle filters, like you can glass bottles. This would end up being a false economy subsidy more than likely. No thanks.

It will still go some way toward them ending up in the sea.

Why do you need to recycle them? A deposit requires no subsidy- the purchaser pays an extra $0.20 per cig, and recoups that when they return the butts. The accomplished function is the recovery of the butts.

Caveat, all the old butts pre-deposit could probably still get returned for $0.20, which would require some money from somewhere.

And now the shop has a shed load of cigarette butts that they need to get rid of at their own expense, and no extra money to show for it.

Recovery rate of deposit programs is generally not 100%, which leaves the shop with some surplus deposit funds that can be applied towards managing the butts.

That's the thing about regulations: it doesn't matter if the store likes them or not.

That's the thing about a democracy, it's hard to screw over small vocal minorities (which the convenience stores and tobacco companies would be if you tried to screw them over). A minority (such as environmentalists who care strongly enough about this to want a law) can't just rule by decree. The environmentalists would need more resources (resources = money and people who care about the issue) on their side than the convenience stores and tobacco companies have on their side in order to get a law like that passed and in practical terms that usually means getting the apathetic majority to not be apathetic the issue at hand. I see that as being very much an uphill battle in this case since the law is against the self-interest of every smoker who would have to bear the cost at point of sale.

Pursuing biodegradable (in a non-geological timescale) filters is probably a better all around option anyway since even with a deposit not all soda cans make it back, compliance for something like cigarette butts would be far less because of the issues outlined in the article.

Nowhere in the comment you replied to was it suggested that it would be achieved by undemocratic means. Ironically, in your comment you imply that democracy consists of lawmaking by whoever has more money.

I don't think anybody suggested that we should subvert democracy in favor of ruling by decree. I also don't think that the numbers of people and amounts of money on each side of an issue are immutable or are unassailable barriers to progress toward the minority side of the issue.

I can get behind your second paragraph (though it wasn't there originally, which is probably why you got flagged).

Price that into the items. If it's not worthwhile for the store to carry them at the going price, the store is free to raise the price or drop the product. Generally the store is doing some work to sell its products in exchange for making some money. What's the problem?

The idea is to make a pack cost 0.2*num_of_cigs_in_pack more dollars and then when someone returns butts, they can receive that money back. It will not be a subsidy and even if the butts were thrown in the trash afterwards, it would at least lower litter.

Butts absolutely stink. No smoker is going yo store 10-20 of them.

I'd rather seem them made biodegradable.

Hmmm, cigarette packs that are modified to allow for easy storage? That sounds gross enough to disincentivize any shot at people redeeming deposit funds.

Even more gross: homeless people scrambling for cigarette butts as a side grift. Which, you know, is sure to happen. More profitable than beer and soda cans, and smaller too?

The thing with cans and bottles is that they aren’t absorbant in the same way that cigarette stubs are. People put their mouth on both, but it’s way easier to avoid saliva touching a can or bottle, than a lipstick stained cigarette.

So those packs would have to be water tight, slotted for 20 stubs, and translucent so no one has to open up or guess at how many stubs are inside, for redemption.

Also, redeeming by weight would require standardized tare weights, and approximates for paper/fiberglass mix by volume. Redeeming a ten pound garbage bag, at 20 cents a butt? What’s that worth? Enough to start a street fight?

It could work. But let’s not give tuberculosis another reason to spread.

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