470,437,945,912 cigarette butts unaccounted-for

J. Taylor Buckley

07/03/1996

USA Today

FINAL

Page 01A

From sea to shining sea, on sidewalks, beaches and parking lots, America is

kicking butts. Or, at least walking all over them.

As anti-smoking sentiment cleanses the landscape of ashtrays and interior air

purists banish smokers to streets, cigarette butts are under foot as never before.

Whether flipped in defiance or just dropped for lack of a receptacle, butt

numbers are multiplying where smokers congregate, and debate now rages not

just over secondhand smoke, but over secondhand cigarettes.

The evidence is clear. Filter-tip butts that once got punched into ashtrays en route

to the dump now languish in every conceivable cranny, from cemetery statuary

to bellies of whales.

Small in size, plague-like in number, several trillion are out there at any given

time, snuggled among Q-tips and coat hangers in landfills, peeking up from park

trails, bobbing along in storm sewers, getting ground to ash and plastic pulp in

the concrete ghettos where smokers of the '90s skulk like lepers of yore.

``Something is missing in the minds of people who think it's OK to throw a

cigarette into the park when they wouldn't think of tossing a coffee cup,'' says

Alexander Grannis, a New York assemblyman and anti-litter crusader. ``Smokers

treat our sidewalks . . . as public ashtrays.''

``He's right,'' grumbles Willie Holloway, the maintenance man in charge of the

sidewalk in front of 444 N. Michigan Avenue, a downtown Chicago office

building. ``You get one batch of butts swept up, and here comes another batch. I

don't like it.''

If we are not walking on them, we are swimming in cigarette butts. Literally.

The Center for Marine Conservation recently announced the result of its 1995

coastal cleanup: The cigarette butt came up No. 1 on its Dirty Dozen list, with

volunteers plucking 800,358 of them from beaches and shores last year.

In the larger butt world, where the typical cellulose acetate filter has an afterlife

of five to seven years, the beach cleanup total is a granule in a sandstorm.

Butt numbers make intergalactical distances look like quick commutes. They

outstrip the capacity of the standard calculator. They make government spending

figures appear almost manageable.

The 800,358 butts reported to the marine center came from only 5,870 miles of

shoreline. That comes out to 136 butts a mile, which suggests 12,054,088 butts a

year wash up on the nation's 88,633 miles of tidal shoreline.

A lot of butts, you say? Considering that Americans light up about 470.45 billion

filter-tip cigarettes a year (only 3% of all cigarettes smoked are filterless), the

shoreline total, which is the only official butt count available, leaves

470,437,945,912 butts unaccounted for. That's almost half a trillion. And that's

just for one year.

Many are discarded properly.

Terry Hanlin, 40, an administrative assistant in Seattle, says she's so

conscientious that she carries a sandwich bag with a little water in it for butt

disposal where ashtrays aren't available. ``I know a lot of people don't care,'' she

says, ``and give the rest of us a bad name.''

Absent an ashtray, millions of smokers like Robert Potashnick, a 22-year-old

University of Washington student, pack their butts home in their pockets.

``The worst case scenario,'' says Potashnick, ``is that I won't be able to wear

these pants tonight.''

The consequences of improper disposal are burned in the mind of Mindy

Herman, 34, a telecommunications executive in Los Angeles. ``A couple of years

ago I tossed a butt out of my car window at an intersection, and it landed on a

cop's windshield. He wrote me a special ticket: two days of traffic school.''

But does flipping a teensy-weensy butt constitute littering?

Gina Gianetto, 28, allows as how she's been known to toss butts from her

fourth-floor apartment balcony over Seattle's Pike Place Market.

She says she always takes precautions, however, ``to the point of running them

under water first,'' and tries not to have the butts ``hit people's sunroofs.''

``Hey, they're always sweeping the street,'' Gianetto says.

She's right. ``They'' always are sweeping the streets.

``If we didn't pick them up, they'd be ankle deep in a few hours,'' says Jerry

Johnson, facilities services supervisor at Pike Place, who figures butt sweeping

costs his crews 190 person-hours a month.

Similarly plagued is Stan Eberhardt, 46, whose job at Harold Washington

College in Chicago's Loop includes butt removal.

``Every half hour or so, you have to go out and sweep up,'' Eberhardt says.

``Sometimes, even if I'm right there with my broom and dustpan, they drop their

butts right in front of my feet. Hell, that's just rude.''

Maybe it's thoughtlessness. Maybe it's retribution for being forced to cower

outside like whipped dogs just to take a few drags. Either way, the mounting

stray-butt problem defies simple solution.

``It shouldn't be society's job to pick up after smokers,'' says assemblyman

Grannis. He thinks it's up to the tobacco companies ``to work on a product that

would not be such a blight,'' though they are hardly the only ones making a

product with a litter component. He is not optimistic.

``Absent a strong kick in the butt, the companies have shown they are unwilling

to move until the pressure becomes unbearable.''

One big company, however, has taken at least some steps. R.J. Reynolds

Tobacco, through its Smokers For A Clean America campaign, has distributed 5

million portable, disposable pouch-like ashtrays since 1991 to about 10,000

individuals, companies and civic organizations such as Keep America Beautiful.

This year alone, Keep America Beautiful and its community groups have

distributed 500,000 of the plastic, foil-lined pouches.

The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't track butts as a separate solid

waste item. They don't clog sewers, and besides their obvious benefit as a

reducer of the tobacco residue that would otherwise be sucked into a smoker's

lungs, the filter makes a fine ear plug, as Army riflemen discovered ages ago.

But as a blight, butts are gaining stature every day. Laid end to end, the butts

somewhere out there right now would reach half way to the sun.

Contributing: Kevin V. Johnson in Chicago, Deeann Glamser in Seattle and

Jonathan Lovitt in Los Angeles.

PHOTO,color,Todd Buchanan; PHOTO,b/w,Todd Buchanan; Caption: Butts:

Smoker stands on littered Chicago sidewalk. Atop a trash can: Butt used to be

punched into ashtrays en route to the dump. Now they languish in every

conceivable cranny.