<story><title>Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straw-ban-cigarette-butts-are-single-greatest-source-ocean-n903661</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.&lt;p&gt;Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwanem</author><text>What does the seller do with it, then? There has to be some sort of sequestration program, possibly involving landfills - but a mass of cigarette butts is likely to produce runoff that&amp;#x27;s toxic to plants and insects, at the very least, if not to everything in its path. So, if you have a multiple-stream recycling program, you probably need to add a stream to that specifically for butts; if you have a single-stream program, I hope your sorters are getting hazard pay already, and if they aren&amp;#x27;t then they sure should be now. And you still have the sequestration problem from here - all you&amp;#x27;ve accomplished is to make it minimally possible to implement that. And all of this costs, and everything downstream of it will cost, too.&lt;p&gt;Cheaper and simpler just to ban cigarettes entirely. And I realize that&amp;#x27;s neither simple nor cheap! But it&amp;#x27;s not the worst idea I&amp;#x27;ve ever heard, either. Even back when I smoked every day, I wasn&amp;#x27;t entirely against it; now that I smoke only when drunk, I favor it considerably more. Yeah, it sucks to go cold turkey, but nicotine isn&amp;#x27;t like ethanol; quitting cold turkey makes you miserable for a while, but it&amp;#x27;s not going to kill anyone.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straw-ban-cigarette-butts-are-single-greatest-source-ocean-n903661</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.&lt;p&gt;Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zaptheimpaler</author><text>I like the idea.. it is tricky to get right though. Cigarette butts smell a lot, so if smokers started carrying around 20 butts in their pack at work&amp;#x2F;home, non-smokers would not like it. Its hard to imagine modifying a pack cheaply enough to contain the smell.</text></comment>