Open your eyes you dumb fucks. Do you see that thing less than 18 inches from where you dropped your cigarette butt? It’s called an ASHTRAY. It is intended to hold your cigarette butt and be easily emptied so that they aren’t strewn all over the fucking ground.
I went out for a smoke a few minutes ago in an area where there are 4 ashtrays in about a 20x20 area. There were at least 15 cigarette butts on the ground, 4 of them within 3 feet of the ashtray I was near. People like that really piss me off.
Wow, you get ashtrays? Because we’ve been pushed outside, I see less ashtrays, I guess the assumption is that with no ashtray smokers won’t light up. I try to put out my butts and drop them in the garbage, but sometimes there aren’t even garbage cans around.
It’s a courtyard area outside a hotel/office tower complex across the street from my building. They have 2 regular ashtrays and two of those tall skinny things with a hole for cigarette butts. (Can’t think of what they’re called) It is a rather nice area.
I forgot the worst part…that whole area is swept nearly daily by the maintanance crew so most of those butts were dropped in less than a day.
My daughter broke me of that habit a long time ago. “The world is not your ashtray!” If there’s no ash tray, I put the fire out and the butt goes in my purse or pocket.
Same thing happened at the last place I worked. Humongous ashtrays everywhere in the outdoor smoking area, and butts all over the ground. That wasn’t as bad as the brown globs of spit from the chewers though.
I’ve never understood this. I know many smokers who would never throw their Mountain Dew bottle out the window, but who flick cigarette butts without a thought. Who told these yutzes that cigarette butts aren’t litter?
There is never an excuse for throwing your cigarettes out into the world…even if there’s no garbage can around. Roll out the cherry and stomp it, or stub it out on the ground, and put it in your damn pocket, until you happen across a garbage can.
I can’t stand inconsiderate smokers. They litter (‘oh, it decomposes!’ Bullshit - whenever it rained at college you could see all the filters from the last six months). They smoke RIGHT outside the door so all the smoke goes inside.
Fortunately so far most of the non-junior college smokers I’ve met have been considerate people. (‘Oh! It’s blowing in your face? Let me move downwind’ = good people)
I was in a computer class years ago with a man that worked from some company I never heard of (and don’t remember today). He explained that his company made the material that fills a cigarette filter. I asked specifically if the stuff decomposed and the answer isn’t just “no” but “hell, no”.
Stuff is biologically inert - it’ll last thousands of years.
Wiki says most filters biodegrade between 10 months and 11 years. Not great, but not 1000 years either.
The whole “but it’s biodegradable” argument always struck me as stupid, too. Paper is biodegradable, but you don’t see me tossing my McDonald’s bag out the window.
(And the people who do that piss me off just as much as the inconsiderate smokers.)
I cannot disagree with anything in this thread, and for these (hopefully) last few weeks of me being a smoker, I will endeavor to be as considerate as ever. There’s no excuse for not disposing of butts properly.
But since no thread is complete without a devil’s advocate, allow me to be an advocate for Satan himself:
Years ago, I was smoking outside of work, where there was a garbage can with an ashtray on top. People were generally very good about using it properly. The actual ashtray was really shallow, but that was rarely an issue.
On that particular day, I was quietly enjoying the process of filling my lungs with tar, when a snooty lady exited the building. She wagged her finger at me and scolded me, saying that smokers never used the ashtray, and were complete slobs for just throwing their butts on the ground, and how all smokers were evil for that. I looked around at the ground, and there were a lot of butts there. I looked at the ashtray, and it was indeed empty. Not just of butts, but ashes, matches, and other trash as well.
“Huh”, I thought out loud, “The wind must have blown them out of there.”
“HA! The wind? Yeah, right!” she replied. She stormed off and opened her umbrella. It was immediately turned inside out and torn to shreds. She wrestled with it to fold it back up, and closed her coat against the driving wind and rain. She then shot me a death-glance and said “Damn inconsiderate smokers!”
That’s one of the few things that has stuck with me from a long involvement in the Rainbow Family, way back earlier in my life: the habit of field stripping butts when I’m smoking outside (unless it’s lean times and a longish butt, then it gets sniped and stashed for later)-- which usually means on the street, since I’m a city boy now. I smoke straights, so it’s merely a matter of dropping the cherry and stomping it out, ripping the butt paper lengthwise, scattering all the little shards and crumbs of tobacco to the breeze and the ground, and dropping the little wad of paper in a back pocket for later tossage. One thing I’ll say for the ol’ hippie-tripsters, they taught me to smoke like a proper gentleman.
Oooh, dip is just the nastiest thing going, ain’t it? My brother and his crew are all dippers or chewers. That’s probably an Appalachian cultural thing – both of our grannies on both sides of the family used to dip the dry kind (which at least came in cool little reusable tin cans with lids) and nobody thought anything of it, but even as a stigmatized butt-sucker, I find the practice utterly gross-tastic. Between the perpetually pooched-out lower lips, the rivers of oily brown spit, and those half-full soda cans they all have to carry around…ick.
What I don’t understand is when I see cigarette butts in urinals. Why would somebody do that? Doesn’t somebody else then have to reach in there and take them out? Ewww.
One summer I briefly worked at the state fair in my city, as a garbage picker-upper. Piece-by-piece, the vast majority was cigarette butts. There were plenty of garbage cans around, but people are lazy pigs. Smokers were easily the most blatantly rude about it as well–people would toss their butts on the ground directly in front of me, sometimes still smoldering. Most people would feel at least a twinge of guilt about doing that if it was a McDonald`s bag or something, but apparently some smokers feel they are immune to such rules.
Littering makes me so angry. It takes so little effort to throw something out, but it makes everything so ugly if you don`t.
Oh, and Really Not All That Bright? Nice to know that your car is sacrosanct but you feel free to dirty up the rest of the world.
IANAS, but I get the impression that people don’t throw them in garbage cans for fear of starting a big garbage can fire. (And they’re too lazy or paranoid to fiddle around with putting the fire out before tossing them, perhaps?)
We have one guy at work who is famous for that kind of shit.
We have a smoking area and two of those tall shinny “hole in the top” ashtrays and a coffee can by the entrance.
He never uses them. He is a pacer. He paces back and forth and back and forth while he hot boxes his smoke. He heads towards the door and then back and when he is finally done he walks to about half way to the entrance and pitches his smoke into the parking lot.
He has had several people including myself say something to him. “Uh Don there is an ashtray right here”. He still does it.
I can not say I have never pitched a smoke out of my car window but it has been many years since I have done so. I use my car ashtray and if I happen to have a cigarette on my way in a store I bend down, put the thing out and then find a garbage can to pitch it in.
My BF is famous for cigarette butts in his jeans pocket. He works home construction and more times than not he does so at peoples homes that do not smoke. He has his cig outside and then after crushing it out he puts it in his pocket. It is kind of yucky but at least he is not flipping them into someones lawn.
Inconsiderate smokers piss me off like no other.
Oh and while we are bitching, put the fucking cigarette out BEFORE you throw it in the ashtray. I can not tell you the times I have come outside for a cigarette and the ashtray is smoking like there is no tomorrow. Knock the damn cherry of it damn it. Nothing smells worse than an ashtray on fire.
