Why don’t smokers toss the unused end of their cigs into garbage cans, including those weird looking, fluted receptacles one sometimes sees outside bars that have been specially designed for this purpose? I’ve stopped asking why. Smokers regard the ground as a natural and convenient ashtray or litter box.
Vape pens have been getting a lot of bad press lately. A tiny number of fatalities, possibly caused by an unapproved additive, have caused a panic. Along with dozens of lawsuits, there are growing calls for legislation to limit the sale and marketing of the pen-shaped vaporizers.
For starters, like nearly everybody, I'm against marketing tobacco products to children; I'd be perfectly happy prohibiting the sale of candy-flavored vape oils, for instance. That said, vapes serve an admirable purpose and shouldn’t be outlawed entirely. Let me explain.
A single vape cartridge replaces a lot of cigarettes. One JUUL cartridge is roughly equal to a pack of cigarettes, or about 200 puffs, according to the JUUL website. (In fact, vape enthusiasts debate this statistic endlessly in online forums.)
So what? If you, like me, clean up trash in your neighborhood daily, you’re already aware that cigarette butts are the primary trash category. Discarded cigarette butts on sidewalks and in street gutters are much more numerous, albeit less obvious, than all the pieces of paper (receipts, wrappers, tissue), coffee cups, plastic bottles and aluminum cans that I collect. On every single walk, I pick up dozens and dozens of butts — at least until the futility of this exercise overwhelms me. Researchers in 2011 concluded that “cigarette butts are the most common form of litter, as an estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are thrown away every year worldwide.”
In other words, vapes produce less trash, since we can safely assume users don’t toss their vape pen after a few puffs, even if it’s one of the $3 to $7 disposable systems. Besides, most vape pens, those in the $15 to $50 price range, use replaceable “juice” cartridges.
Aside from being unsightly street trash, you may be unsurprised to learn that cigarette butts are toxic. Chemicals such as arsenic, nicotine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals have been found to leach into the environment from cigarette butts littered along roadsides and in laboratory studies. It’d be marvelous if tobacco companies had figured out a way to make cigarette butts edible, a la Pez candy, but they didn’t. And here we are.
Why don’t smokers toss the unused end of their cigs into garbage cans, including those weird looking, fluted receptacles one sometimes sees outside bars that have been specially designed for this purpose? I’ve stopped asking why. Smokers regard the ground as a natural and convenient ashtray or litter box.
It’s worth observing that cigarette smokers are different from pipe smokers in this respect. I know something about pipe smoking, a largely abandoned form of the habit. In the late 1960s, after my dad quit smoking cigarettes, he began buying meerschaum pipes. As a youngster, I fondly watched him clean and pack his pipes, a collection that was, sadly, lost years ago after a number of downsizing house moves. (Unlike cigarettes, meerschaum pipes become more beautiful with use.) As I remember it, dad spent 10x more time fussing with his pipes than actually smoking them. He quit all forms of smoking by the time I was in college. Nevertheless, decades later, in his 90th year, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away a few months later. And if you’re wondering: I blame cigarettes, not pipes.
So for ecological and health reasons, I’m in favor of vapes over cigarettes, and pipes over either. After the world’s surviving cigarette smokers switch to vapes (or meerschaum pipes), maybe we can get everybody to quit tossing their empty plastic water and soda bottles into the street.