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Imagine your driving along a beautiful stretch of road in the mountains. Pristine lakes glisten like diamonds as the sun's rays hit small ripples. Wild flowers gently wave alongside the road and the sweet smell of pine trees wafts through your open window as you cruise along. Then, in the short matter of seconds, the person in front of you flicks a cigarette butt onto the pavement where it bursts into a spray of sparks like some miniature firework display.
When I was in 4th grade, my family received a pack of cigarettes in the mail as a promotional from some tobacco company. My mother, using some warped thought process, decided that one way to keep us from smoking was to allow us to smoke as much as we wanted to. So, she lined us up on the backdoor porch (outside, mind you) and gave us each a cigarette. My three siblings took to coughing immediately and hated it. I, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of them and she had to take them away from me. I never was a normal child.
Don't get me wrong though, I don't smoke. While I may love the taste, it didn't take long to work through the process: smoking causes cancer, cancer kills, therefore smoking kills. In addition to that it leaves a bad smell on clothes and hair, colors teeth and fingers and well, truthfully, I have no desire to look like Puff the Magic Dragon.
Unfortunately, there's one aspect to smoking that isn’t ever discussed much. In my view, in addition to the second-hand smoke issue is the realization that many smokers (I'm not saying ALL smokers, but definitely the majority) aren't considerate enough to take care of their own cigarette butts.
Half of all roadside litter is cigarette butts, in fact. Billions of cigarettes are flicked every day around the world, adding up to an estimated 4.5 trillion yearly. What make it worse is that the filter of a cigarette is made from cellulose acetate, a form of plastic, so it can take many years for it to biodegrade.
What happens to that single butt that's thrown out on the highway, crushed underfoot on a city sidewalk, or dropped through the bleachers during a football match? What happens after that butt gets casually flicked onto the street, nature trail, or beach? There's a good chance that the next rain will carry the cigarette into the nearest stream, puddle, or sewer where the toxic chemicals the cigarette filter was designed to trap leak out into aquatic ecosystems, threatening the quality of the water and many aquatic lifeforms.
That's not the only concern that cigarette butts create. On March 23, 1999, 39 people were killed when a fire erupted in the Mont Blanc Tunnel in France. A cigarette butt was thrown from another vehicle, entered the truck's intake and set fire to the air filter and then the entire engine. One small butt killed 39 people.
Do I think smoking should be banned in public places? Absolutely.
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