In addition to teaching smokers how to properly dispose of cigarette butts, cities must provide enough disposal spots that doing the right thing is easy and convenient.J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press
It’s the time of year when robins herald spring, sitting on a patio becomes a goal rather than a dream – and millions of cigarette butts emerge from receding piles of snow.
Of course, spring doesn’t come all at once to a country as big as Canada. Nasty weather is expected to hit Atlantic Canada this weekend and snow fell recently in Alberta. But nicer temperatures are coming to those areas as well, and the same litter will be unearthed there.
The word litter is used advisedly here. Although many smokers believe that a butt does not count as garbage, and so can be flicked with impunity, it is litter. In fact, it is a particularly nasty form of litter, befouling public spaces, poisoning animals, suffocating birds and polluting water and soil. Butts disintegrate very slowly and their microplastics can find their way into human bodies.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Many other countries are building a social obligation to stub out in a provided receptacle. It’s not 100 per cent effective – no social norm is – but there are noticeably fewer butts in places such as Venice than in years past. And in Japan, where cleanliness is a common civic virtue, smokers habitually tuck butts into a pocket-sized receptacle if there’s nowhere else to put them.
Canadian smokers need to follow suit, and to stop inflicting their garbage on everyone else.
To help motivate them, cities should move beyond fines and pair behavioural nudges with plenty of smoking-specific garbage cans that make it easy to dispose of butts.
This sort of multi-pronged approach is necessary because research shows that cigarette butts are a complicated object for smokers.
Some of them feel guilty about their habit – either because they would like to quit or because they know that society disapproves – and so the butt is something they want to dispose of quickly. At the same time, many smokers wrongly believe that butts are natural and will biodegrade, so they don’t see them in the same category as other litter.
Many Canadian cities do not track cigarette butts as a distinct form of litter, but some that do reveal the scale of the problem.
In Vancouver, city staff estimate that 450,000 cigarette butts are discarded daily. These make up one-quarter of the small litter gathered by cleaning crews.
A litter survey done every other year in Toronto shows that cigarette butts and chewing gum are typically the most commonly discarded small items, a category that includes detritus such as candy wrappers, glass and bottle caps.
These cities also illustrate how limited anti-butt efforts can be ineffective. Both Toronto and Vancouver include tossing butts in their anti-littering bylaws. But neither could provide statistics on how often people actually are fined for this, and any deterrent effect is evidently minimal.
Adding to the problem is that decades of legal changes have, quite appropriately, pushed smoking out of doors. There are more butts to dispose of in public.
Some possible solutions include banning plastic filters, which have no health benefit, and adding a clean-up fee to the price of cigarettes. The former would be a major public policy shift that could take years while the latter penalizes both conscientious and lazy smokers, and could make people feel even freer to litter because they’ve paid for the privilege.
Better to work on smokers’ attitudes.
First, create ads that make clear that butts pose risk and are indeed litter. Ads should also target the sense among smokers that everyone else tosses butts, which may give them licence to do likewise. The messages can be framed as a joint effort to keep the street clean.
Then, provide enough cigarette-specific disposal spots that doing the right thing is easy and convenient. A receptacle should always be nearby in well-used public spaces. The more the better.
Although it may seem silly, turning butt disposal into a sort of game can also help. For a study in Bratislava, labelling bins with a light-hearted question – allowing people to “vote” whether pineapple belonged on pizza, for example, by choosing different holes for their butt – significantly reduced the incidence of discarded cigarettes.
Creating new social norms takes time. It’s not easy, but the multi-decade decline in smoking rates shows it can be done. It would be worth it. Imagine a year in which the melting snows reveal only the green shoots of spring.