Issue Exploration

While cigarette smoking has dropped in America by 28%, something more dangerous to society as a whole remains unspoken. Cigarette butts are the most littered item in the U.S., and the entire globe. Nearly every corner you turn on Ohio State’s campus, if you look at the curb, there are bound to be cigarette butts. Toxic chemicals laden with carcinogens collect in the filter of the cigarette and get washed around by rain water. The cigarette butts are then often times eaten by birds or small to medium sized mammals as they mistake it for food.

The root cause of this is simple, people simply don’t know that cigarette butts are litter. A survey by Keep America Beautiful said that 77% of individuals don’t identify cigarette butts as litter. Another problem area is known as a transition site. A transition site is anywhere that a smoker must put out their cigarette before entering, for example: beaches, restaurants, parks, and stores. According to one study, only 47% of these transition points have an ash tray or trash can. To make things worse, cars are no longer being made with ash trays, so drivers are more inclined to simply throw a cigarette butt out the window.

While litter laws are a real thing in Ohio, I personally have never, EVER, seen them enforced. There are numerous laws in the Ohio Revised Code with littering as the offense. To begin, we should look at how Ohio describes litter. It is described as, “any trash thrown down, discarded, or dropped by a person onto public property, private property not owned by an individual, or into Ohio’s waterways”. The code also later says that it is littering whether the act is intentional or not. Littering in Ohio is supposedly punishable by fines up to $500 and 60 days in jail.

While it may not appear so at first, cigarette butt litter impacts the community more than you think. Other than killing local fauna, cigarette butts make public spaces look unappealing, and make up around 34% of all litter in outdoor recreation areas. Cigarette butt litter can also lower a city’s foot traffic, tourism, and housing value. It has been shown that if a community has litter, the property value will be at least 7% lower than if it did not. I found an organization, Kick Butt Columbus, that holds an annual highway ramp clean up to remove cigarette butt litter and raise awareness on the hazards of this act. While this does help remediate the problem, I don’t think that it addresses the root cause. I think there should be more education and implementation of cigarette butt receptacles rather than simply cleaning up other people’s messes.

I selected the TED talk titled This app makes it fun to pick up litter. This TED talk mainly talked about a crowd sourced litter clean up app, but I learned a bit about the relationship between San Francisco and big tobacco. I think the most important thing that I learned is that every community has its own sort of litter blueprint. I could look at the data for this in the future and find the best places to place receptacles or put up signs and talk to people. One bias that may be present in this video is that the speaker created this app he is speaking about. This means he is very passionate towards the issue and is a bit more likely to only pull facts from the side that he agrees with.