Last edited Wed Jun 25, 2014, 10:41 AM - Edit history (2)

Back when I smoked the real thing, I was never comfortable with throwing butts any old place and would put the butt in my pocket or purse if there was no garbage can available. You do realize that antismokers have removed many ashtrays and garbage cans to discourage smokers, so they have made the problem worse. I think it is a nasty habit but I think neoliberal yuppy obsession with it is far more offensive. Many people have nasty vices of one kind or another and it doesn't produce so much vitriol. I think they are closet bullies. I also think it is done to justify regressive taxes.

Do you consider yourself unusual compared to other smokers you know?

So I don't know.

Come to think of it, a man I work with throws them all over, but he is also a drinker and does the same thing with beer cans.

I agree. Why didn't Mayor Bloomberg use the money from cigarette taxes to really fund stop smoking clinics, and literature?

The Stop Smoking video library of Joel Spitzer (bookmark it for a friend)

Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking (the video)

Two years free thanks to Allen Carr's system

Former cigarette smoker here who switched to e-cigarettes. I always tried my hardest, when I smoked, not to throw butts anywhere. I would extinguish a cigarette and put it in my purse (I'd usually keep an empty pack in which to store them) or pocket, and then wait to find a trash receptacle. (Eww, temporarily stinky purse, but it was mine.).

And yes, the problem was worsened considerably when people were sent outdoors in the cold from office buildings, with no place to put the butts. Society creates these problems while it has its blinders on trying to fix another.

And yes, regressive taxes. I can't wait for all the sky-high taxes to accrue to marijuana, and hopefully sugary drinks and trans-fats. And those disgusting cans of soda pop thrown by the side of the road, and McDonald's wrappers. Do we have indignant posts regarding those?

...and soda cans on the ground, that's more the exception than the rule with eating fast food and drinking soda. There aren't as many "indignant posts regarding those" because that doesn't happen as much.

When it comes to cigarettes smoked outdoors and in cars, however, throwing the butts on the ground appears to be the most common thing for smokers to do, with the people speaking up in this thread to say how they don't litter with cigarette butts being the ones who stand out as making a special effort.

In fact, many people who generally aren't slobs about most things, who would never dream of throwing food wrappers or soda cans on the ground, make an exception for their cigarette butts.

n/t

...but my personal observations, and those of many other people, so strongly support my general conclusion that I feel pretty damned confident -- certainly meeting the level of confidence necessary for starting a thread like this -- about that conclusion.

Seeing someone toss non-cigarette butt trash on the ground is such a rare event for me that it's fairly shocking and surprising. It's been at least a year, maybe even two, since the last time I saw that happen.

On the other hand, seeing cigarette butts flying out of car windows is something I see fairly often. When I see people smoking outside, seeing them toss their butts on the ground when they're done, then crushing them into the ground with their foot, it's so common that, while it annoys me, it doesn't surprise me in the least.

It's hard to imagine the huge degree of skewed observation and selective attention it would take for my observations to be hiding the surprising hypothetical fact that, say, people who eat at McDonald's outdoors or in their cars are actually throwing their cups and wrappers and boxes on the ground with anywhere close to the same (or equal, or greater) frequency that outdoor and driving smokers throw their butts out onto the ground.

I live near a river: I see the crap that people throw over the bridges and collects in disgusting clumps. I see used condoms on the sidewalks. Not all smokers (as this thread attests) throw their butts around, either.

ON Edit: You're also ignoring the issue the poster brought up: that if people weren't forced outside with nowhere to extinguish their cigarettes, there wouldn't be much litter. How about putting ashtrays on every street corner and on beaches, etc.? People who eat indoors have a place to put their trash. When they walk around with it, they often wad it up and throw it somewhere. It's as simple as that. Provide waste receptacles and people will use them. Do not, and don't complain.

It gets there somehow, obviously.

But how often do you see that dumping actually happen? Further, since that other kind of trash is bigger and often more colorful, it stands out when seen from a distance more easily. It takes many fewer incidents of wrapper/can/bottle/box littering to create a noticeable visual result. Things like paper wrappers blow around easily, and someone might even have at least made an attempt at proper disposal before the wind grabbed their trash and blew it away.

If people in general are even slightly close to throwing their other kinds of trash around as much as smokers litter with their butts, at the very least then they're more ashamed about it, or more worried about littering fines, because they generally hide that behavior rather than brashly doing it in the open as smokers so often do when tossing thier butts around.

As for having more places to dispose things -- I'm all for that. It's best to attack problems from multiple angles if you can. But I don't excuse myself for littering with food wrappers and bottles and cans when trash cans aren't convenient -- I inconvenience myself and haul the trash around for as long as I have to. The fact that providing more places to dispose of cigarette butts is a good component of a solution, it still doesn't excuse anyone blithely littering with cigarette butts because disposal isn't convenient for them.

I kept an old altoids container in my purse for the butts. I agree with you on the rest of your post.

I volunteer myself to pick up other people's butts off the grass by the beach because they're too lazy or don't see it as a problem to have the ground littered with their butts.

I read once awhile ago in our paper that the city council was thinking of banning smoking in the state parks because of the cig butt litter epidemic. But, nothing's has come of that, yet.

from fishermen!

Which tends to make people more conscientious.

I have never seen her leave a butt on the ground.

on edit-- she usually puts the butts in a cigarette case or back in the pack, not her pocket itself most of the time, but she'll use her pocket it she doesn't have any other place to put them.

Just because I had one disgusting filthy habit does not mean I am an asshole mindless litterbug.

I would brush off the burning end on either a sidewalk or a nearby building, pinch it between my fingers and place it in my pocket.

But I don't have to do that any more. Quit years ago.

until I got smart and put a sandwich bag in my purse to hold the butts.

along with a plastic supermarket bag. I ate my lunch at a park across the street from the school where I worked. When I was finished eating and smoking, I put everything in the tied up plastic bag, and in a trash can at the park. There were not only butts, but sandwich bags, napkins, etc.

Yes, smoking was allowed in that park. You would be surprised at all the smokers I met at that picnic table. "Mind if we join you?" lol What really SHOCKED me was the number of NON-SMOKERS who were fine with me smoking next to them. Rare in today's world.

Last edited Thu Jun 26, 2014, 01:22 AM - Edit history (1)

my upstairs neighbor on the third floor was tossing butts off his balcony to the property below. I ended up calling an apartment assistant manager once and nothing was done, I went over her head and talked to the manager a second time. He said that he walked the property and didn't see any butts on the ground--however, he really didn't walk the property at all. The third time I complained, he came by after work that day and I showed him the evidence--there were nearly 50 butts on the ground. He went upstairs to my neighbor that Saturday evening and told him that if didn't clean up his mess by Monday that he would give him a $50 fine for littering on the property.

Problem solved and the property near my balcony didn't see another cigarette butt afterwards.

big peeve of mine now because I'm always picking up other people's at the beach where I go to run. Not on the sand but on the grass that meets the beach. I carry little doggie poop bags that are dispensed near by and get them out of my sight!

"The World is Not their Ashtray"!

When I was smoking, I would break off the tobacco/paper part, which is biodegradable and then throw the filter into a trash can or store it in my cigarette pack until I found a trash can.

I did this everywhere, including when driving in my car.

I think more and more people are disposing of their butts properly.

Sending you no craving vibrations.....

I am on day 4 and doing ok. After 47 years, this is no cake walk, but I am sure I have smoked my last cigarette.

I imagine the cravings to be this little green monster who is throwing a huge temper tantrum, saying "Feed me!! Feed me!!".

Then I imagine stabbing it while saying, "You are going to die!".

I will be where you are in one year, I am sure.

Many benefits become quickly apparent. If I could have, I'd have sailed out to sea and stayed there the first week...

I am leaving the country next Monday. Long flight and layover, new environment. I think all of this will help.

This is the first time I have quit and feel really positive about it. I read "The Easy Way" and it offered me an approach that I have never taken.

Anyway, hopefully as we meet up over the next year, I can give you the good news!

As you suggest, I carry a tin and field strip my butts. It doesn't take much effort at all.

I do, however, take trash bags and clean the neighborhood (including alleyways) of litter once a month. The biggest problem here is the plethora of beer bottles and cans -- along with folks who don't clean up after their dogs.

Do you simply toss your empty food and drink containers out the window? Someone is doing it.

I smoked for years, field stripped and well disposed of always. I don't see much in the way of butts around here and litter is not nearly as bad here as in some places. I do see those food and bevvie containers at times. I think 'fucking eaters, goddamn beer swillers!!!'
Actually, I don't blame eaters and drinkers for littering, I blame littering slobs.

...tossing their butts on the ground is almost de rigueur, whereas, while the other types of littering obviously happen (and you can easily see the results of it), I've never known anyone personally who would just as casually toss their non-cigarette trash on the ground, and witnessing others doing so is a very rare event.

I don't blame each and every smoker for littering. I'm simply calling out the fact that too many smokers, many of whom would never litter in any other fashion, make a special exception for their cigarette butts.

Do you ever sip a can of soda or beer? Shall I, when I see such items littered, assume that all who take such sips also hurl their trash on the side of the road? Someone is doing it. I bet they are pretty fucking casual about it as well. I never see anyone flick a butt. Ever. I do see litter on the ground, most of it is food related. Fucking food eaters. Who do they think they are?

My personal experience is what it is, but even given that, I did say "I'm sure they're out there", so if that doesn't set the "tone" of my OP well enough for you to get the idea that I'm not categorically calling all smokers litterbugs, that's your problem.

I do not smoke in my vehicle.

I never have.

I do not throw cigarette butts on the ground.

I do not throw cigarette butts on my farmland.

When visiting friends or family I ask where they would like me to dispose of my cigarette butts.

If they do not have a specific place I put them back into my cigarette holder.

Please address all the people who throw their beer bottles, cans, and food wrappers on my property.

I don't litter period !!!

Cigarette butt littering is a global problem and the makers of this bad dream refuse to wake up. Thirty-five per cent of smokers do not litter. It is time for the other 65% to follow suit. I believe it is worth it to try and change this particularly toxic behavior.

There is a website for people who care about lowering the overall rate of littering, to be found at http://www.litterpreventionprogram.com/

Not great, of course, but better than I'd have guessed.

A horse acquaintance of mine was bringing home a rescued BLM mare in foal when the trailer started jumping around the highway. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw flames and smoke coming out from inside the trailer.

She was able to get the trailer safely off the highway, but not before that poor mare had been horribly burned up. She had to wait several hours holding that poor, horribly suffering mare while waiting for a veterinarian to arrive. The mare could not be saved.

The police determined that some filthy asshole had probably thrown their butt out a car window and it was sucked into the trailer and caught the mare's hay and bedding on fire. She was burned up alive.


Just the other day I was walking my dogs and some filthy asshole flicked his butt out his window, giving us a nice spray of his stinking, filthy smoke and ashes, which were blown onto bone dry, burned to a crisp grass by the side of the road.

People need to grow up and stop treating the world and their neighbors like their fucking ashtrays.

...to discover that some clown had emptied his car ashtray onto the pavement next to the parking space? Just open the car door, lean out and dump the mess on the pavement beside your car, then drive away with the convenience of an empty ash tray. Nice.

Most newer cars don't. It's their way to try to deter smoking.

...both were careful to squish the butt all the way out and then find a place to dispose of it.

But you are right, it is extremely unusual.

how cigarette smoker PITCH their butts away. They just don't causally drop them, they throw them as if making some sort of angry statement ,"Damn it, smoked another one of these shitty things. I hate myself."

Me, I was a pack a day thru college but then I spent a week with my dying,cancer ridden father in the hospital and stopped after the third day of that horrible week. He was a Pall Mall smoker who I admired and probably had an influence on my grabbing the discarded butts and smoking them in the basement. Ironic that the same influence the cigarettes had on him later would stop my smoking.

I quit for 3 of those years.

I stripped the cherry and put the butt back in the pack. Learned to strip cigs in the Army and have continued since.

...I was somewhere with my sister, who was an environmentalist, and I was smoking a filter cigarette. She made some snotty remark about discarding the butt and about how it would be littering the landscpe for thirty years or more. I didn't say anything, just reached into my shirt pocket and showed her the half dozen filters and rolled up papers I had placed there during the day. She apologized for her assumption.

I field stripped my butts and saved the paper and filters for proper disposal.

You know, the tiny one on the right front...when I smoked I would stub them out, then crush them and stick them in that lil pocket. My wife hated me on laundry days.

Of coarse I have not smoked for 8 years now. (Think it is bad in the US, stop at a public rest area on the Autobahn - you need a shovel to get through the butts on the ground in some of those places...)

Butts all over the place. Ever pull into a parking spot and someone has dumped out their car ashtray? Gross. There must be exceptions, but I haven't run across them.

(both smokers and non-smokers). So in places where i have lived where throwing butts outside was appropriate people did that, and in others they waited for a dustbin.

I never saw anyone flick their butts in Camarillo, CA, in Queen Creek, Az I see it all the time.
And in Queen Creek, Az we just got recycling containers. We be behind the times here. Home to Joe Arpayo

Used to bring one with me to class in college back int eh '70's (when we could light up in the classrooms!)

As for littering, I was usually pretty good about that. Walking along the street you could dash the cigarette out and flick away the ash and remaining tobacco then hold onto the filter till you found a trash can.

I always smoked non-filtered cigs--no butts.

I dispose of them all properly. Never just throw them on the ground.

Particularly when I am on a motorcycle. But they can fly in open car windows also. I have even heard of them being blown back into the same car they came out of.,,,,

I even saw a state trooper do this once .....

And either carry the butt to a trash can, or ash tray! I never litter with them. I put ashtrays in my cars, since they don't come with them anymore.
Living here in the desert, where fire hazards are high, I never throw them out the window!!!

One day I simply stopped and realized how dumb it was.. Cigarettes made me lazy. From that point on I flicked off the cherry with my finger and either pocketed the butt, bottled it, or threw it away in the trash.

Now I dispose of nothing but flavor-infused water vapor.

Even when I am driving, I normally keep an empty water bottle so I can put the butts in there when I am finished.
I also try to always use the cigarette receptacles that most places have outside the door.
If I am in public and there's no receptacles around, I usually stomp the cigarette out with my foot and hold it until I can find a garbage.

It's not 100 percent of the time, but I try to be as considerate as possible.

Filter in the pocket for later disposal.

claims never to have dropped butts on the ground, I just wonder where all those cigarette butts come from.

I don't think I've ever known a smoker who didn't casually drop the butt wherever.

or at least that's what your profile says.
So none of those butts there are mine. ( I live in CT)



Blame your neighbors. Not DU!

I guess I'll have to appoint myself the butt nazi. Somehow that doesn't sound right, does it?

But people who don't dispose of their butts properly does not bother me half as much as people who do not dispose of their gum properly.

...I always keep the paper or foil the gum was wrapped in to wrap the gum in when I'm done with it, and carry the trash in my pocket until I can throw it away properly.

Or, sometimes, I just swallow the gum to get rid of it.

I don't see discarded gum these days nearly as much as when I was in school and it could routinely be found under desks. When I do see it, yes, it's an ugly mess, and not too long ago I had to scrape someone's gum out of one of my sneakers. Yuck.

It really sucks when you (or in my case, the bad gum chewer) ruin a pair of shoes the first time you wear them (these were cloth flats, so not exactly salvageable. To this day, I would love to send that person a bill for the shoes.

I use mints instead of gum. They dissolve so no disposal (except for wrappers) to worry about).

I do this in Portland all the time, you just flick the cigarette till the cherry falls out then verify the cigarette is no longer lit, a finger to the end of the cigarette usually works for me, if its warm or I get a burn flick some more till the lit tobacco falls out then put your butt in the garbage can. I do this every day, the people I work with do this every day and we have never had a garbage can catch fire and we don't litter. And if I am walking the streets of Portland there is a Garbage can on almost every corner in downtown so it's not really an issue.

Also I don't smoke unless I know there is a place to dispose my butt, so I don't smoke in Parks, hiking trails or randomly as I walk through neighborhoods. If I need a smoke I will find a garbage can, have my smoke and then dispose of the butt, there are a lot of people like us out there. We are the same people who would never throw a gum rapper on the ground so why would we do that to a butt.

I feel your anger and it's totally justified.

People who can't be bothered to properly dispose of their cigarette butts are assholes. It's that simple.

Assholes.

I always use my car ashtray. Plus, if you are seen by a policeman throwing a cigarette butt from your car, you could be fined.

eventually, i even lined all my ashtrays with tinfoil so cleanup was easy and did not leave a smelly ashtray behind. my bf and i quit 7 years ago . . . just before his quintuple bypass.

That is, until 12 June, when I quit smoking.

Probably one of the few considerate smokers left Always ask to light if there is someone nearby or I move away. Fan if I see the smoke billowing towards somebody. Regardless if others are smoking, if someone is eating I ask or move away. I don't know too many others that do the same. And if there is no ashtray available the butt goes right into my pocket after I extinguish it.

I would stomp out a cig, pick it up and put in a trash can or in my pocket. Yes, I did.

I would also pick up other butts I found lying around.

Have you?

Have you ever picked up any other trash lying around?

(quit smoking 3 years ago, btw)

Basically, like this: http://www.wikihow.com/Field-Strip-a-Cigarette

He'd carry off the filters in his pocket to dispose of later.

When riding, he'd have a soda can tied to the saddle horn with either water or sand in it and drop his butts in there.