Cigarette butts are polluting the ocean more than plastic straws | Hacker News Reader

Cigarette butts are polluting the ocean more than plastic straws

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25 pointselorant7 comments

I've often wondered why society doesn't force cigarette manufacturers to make biodegradeable cigarette butts. I've never seen a smoker throw their butts anywhere but the ground.

> I've never seen a smoker throw their butts anywhere but the ground.

This is one of those areas where you get much better (far from perfect but better) results if you make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. It doesn't take much to make smokers happy, a large enough area for them, some cover and some ashtrays, do this and people will generally use ashtrays. These days so many places are rushing to vilify smokers and push them out on the street, when you're out in a side street getting your fix, maybe getting rained on or baking in the sun and don't have an ashtray or bin in sight then the ciggie butt is going on the ground.

It's like complaining about litter but not providing bins.

I have allergies and my nose runs a lot. Somehow I manage to not throw my tissues on the ground.

Is it so hard to carry an ash box with a cigarette box?

Of course you can solve it with incentives, but you place the burden on restaurant owners and cities to place bins everywhere. Note these are different from regular bins too. And even then you will still get people that fail to use them.

Imo, the effort, or financial cost should be with the manufacturers as OP suggested to modify their product.

What's the difference between a cigarette butt and a plastic straw? The government makes no money off straws.

Same can be said of the drugs they campaign so hard against too. There's plenty of problems with stuff like ecstasy / meth and the like, and I'm sure they cause problems that affect non-users people indirectly, but cigarettes are insidious in that you're going to breath in that crap whether you like it or not as soon as you go anywhere where smoking is prevalent.

But I'm sure the money they getting over and under the table makes it all okay! /s

In 10 years, you won't be able to make that joke.

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