I used to work with a lady that I found to be a bit of a hottie. About my age, Romanian Eurobabe, sports a stunning rack to boot. Sure I knew she smoked, but that fit with the European thing…I could almost look past that. One day I was behind her car coming in to work in the morning. I watched her casually drop a butt out the window. Completely cured me of any attraction that did. Hottie to swine in the time it took that butt to drop 4 feet or so.
I smoke, and dropping the butts on the ground is totally littering. I field-strip the cigarette if I’m at the end (if I only smoke half, it goes back into the pack, which goes into my purse and gets zipped up so it doesn’t stink everywhere). I bring the butt inside, wrap in paper towels, and put it in the office kitchen garbage. I hate standing there amid other smokers’ dropped butts and people thinking it’s me.
Then I wash my hands and have a gum to help alleviate the stench. Gawd. Wish I could stay quit.
My car doesn’t have an ashtray, so one of those Altoids round tins with a lid is my ashtray there. I don’t drop butts out the window.
I wouldn’t do it at home; why should I do it out in public?
The Altoids peppermint boxes (one for post-cig mint, one for butts) is a fabulous idea as well. The round tin just happens to sit perfectly in the cupholder in my car, though.
I could give a shit about your sympathy, and if I sat next to YOU at work, I’d bring my cigarette butts back in with me and enjoy your misery, if you’re gonna bitch regardless.
It’s funny as hell, really. They make us smoke outside, which I’m fine with. But then they take away the smoking areas (with their attendant ashtrays) and bitch about the litter. And I guarantee you that if taking one’s stubbed out cigarette butts inside became common, the bitching would escalate to howling, and do you know what, they’d be right, because stubbed out butts are smell way worse than smoke.
Don’t go to Everest.
Diana, just a thought, if I may, just throwing this out there…
…why don’t you just quit smoking, you smelly cancer-spreading bitch? That’ll solve your litter and stench problem and greatly reduce the amount of complaining your tortured little soul must endure, oh how I pity you…
Apple cores and banana peels will decompose, too, but until they do, they’re still litter.
If only there was something you could do to alleviate this constant problem.
People, can y’all think of a possible solution to DianaG’s dilemma?
Yeah, I could quit smoking. God knows it’s the only thing that would make you happy. But since I enjoy smoking and care not at all about making you happy, I think I’ll continue to do what makes ME happy, thanks.
Hottie to swine? That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think? I mean, the butts are littering but they are essentially cotton wrapped in paper. Biodegradable. Its not like she was pouring motor oil down the sink or throwing a styrofoam container out the window…
Oh, smoking brings out the melodrama in lots of people.
Did you actually use the term “biodegradable”?
Really?
I look after my yard, and that includes picking up cigarette butts off of it EVERY FUCKING DAY. If I didn’t go out and pick them up, I would have that gorgeous look of cigarette butts everywhere that is so incredibly beautiful. It drives me crazy that people throw their butts on MY YARD. The road isn’t a much better option, but at least they would be in the gutter, not on the yard that we paid so much money for, and put so much time and effort into keeping up.
I’ve come to conclusion that a whole lot of smokers are just ignorant gits, anyway. There are ALWAYS butt stops around for them to put their butts in at work and malls, and there are ALWAYS butts littering the ground around the smoking area. It’s not that there isn’t a good place to put the butts, it’s that the smokers don’t care.
I’m not sure if the while “cotton” thing is a holdover myth, or if it’s something that smokers tell themselves so they can feel better about being selfish, but…
From here:
And here’s a whole article on the issue of cigarette butts and the issue of biodegradability, litter, and health from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, hosted on the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health website.
It’s worth noting, too, that the ostensible purpose of the filter is to catch some of the poisons that come from the tobacco. So, even if they were biodegradable, you’d still be throwing away a biodegradable product that is filled with the various toxins that come from the cigarette. Nice.
Cellulose acetate. Polyester fibers. Look it up before you say something dumb.
Hey, you know what else is biodegradable?
YOU! After you die of cancer!
When my kids were very small we lived in a ground floor apartment with a nice patch of open space right off our small patio. Perfect for little kids to play. Until we got new upstairs neighbors who would throw every butt they or all their friends smoked off their balcony onto the open space below. I spent so many mornings (especially saturdays and sundays) hand cleaning the open space of dozens of cigarette butts just so my kids could kick a ball around in front of our place. And they knew, as they were hanging on their deck often watching. I was never so happy to move at the end of that summer.
It’s littering and many people who don’t smoke really can’t stand the way it dirties up the world.
Shrug. Everybody dies of something.
Everybody ends up dead, but how they die can make all the difference in the world to the person dying and to the family who has to watch them go. Smoking is your choice, it’s legal and it’s not immoral, so do what you want. But do not make the mistake of minimizing the slow agonizing death of cigarette associated diseases and suffering those diseases cause on the people who love you.
Well, picking up after your dog is gross, too, but we don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t do it and complain that there’s nowhere to throw it and that they don’t want to carry it around with them.
We might have a bit more sympathy if you tried to get rid of most of the dog shit by smoking it.
Nah, not really-you’d still stink like shit.