Hey, Buddy, I See that Butt!

I'm officially part of the Green Mountain Energy Clean-Up Team that participates in the Keep Austin Beautiful program. That means that I spent a couple of hours on Saturday morning picking up litter along a seven block area of Rio Grand Street in Austin. That portion of the street is Green Mountain's litter territory. I was the butt lady. I found that to be poetic justice. Saturday I picked up 800 cigarette butts that had been discarded in the aforementioned 7 block area. My fellow team members picked up another 2000 or so. Isn't that appalling? We collected the cigarette butts separately (in a big zip lock) with a tally sheet taped onto the front. This is apparently an adjunct project of Keep Austin Beautiful (pretty self-explanatory organization and project).


I realized that as a former smoker I was guilty of discarding butts on the street. For some reason there was and still is this amazing disconnect between cigarette butts and litter. I wouldn't drop so much as a gum wrapper on the ground, but thought nothing about casually dropping a butt, grinding it with my foot and walking on. I will admit that I got a bit less casual toward the end of my smoking career, but I can't even count the number I just casually tossed on the ground over the number of years that I smoked.


One thing struck me today. We keep limiting the places it's acceptable to smoke, so that we are forcing the smokers (and there are about 20% of us who do continue to smoke daily) to smoke on the street. However, there's nothing provided for butt disposal. Are you supposed to put it in your pocket? I used to carry a zip lock for my filters - at times - like when I was camping. Even I knew that it wasn't right to toss a butt in the forest.


I can tell you that there are at least two smokers who regularly walk up and down Rio Grand in Austin. How? Well, there were two distinctive brands of cigarettes whose butts were somewhat 'new' cigarette butt litter spaced out along the seven blocks. I can also tell you that the unsmoked tobacco goes away pretty fast, and even the paper that covers the filter goes away pretty fast, but that filter NEVER goes away.


The Green Mountain team picked up not just cigarette butts, but also all the litter along their territory. We managed to fill some pretty big bags which tells me there are still people out there who think it's OK to toss garbage on the ground. Here's a clue: It's not OK to toss anything that's not biodegradeable onto the ground. I can also tell you that picking up litter for two hours will certainly activate your litter radar. As we've walked all around the Austin downtown and South Congress area, I've been seeing litter, especially those damn cigarette butts EVERYWHERE. Give ALL of us a break: Make it your person mission to never throw anything on the ground that someone else has to pick up.