Have you ever heard of “broken window syndrome?” It’s the idea that once there are a couple of broken windows on buildings in an area, quickly more will start getting broken. But if every window is intact, you will only get the occasional vandal being bold enough to break the first one.

It’s not scientific and may not even have any truth in it, but there is something to be said for the idea that if people see others doing something, they are more likely to go ahead and do it themselves.

To the point: if you see thousands of butts everywhere, smokers do too and probably consider it normal by now, and don’t care.

This only explains how things go from bad to worse. So who drops the first butt? Well: it’s the most selfish, lazy, inconsiderate guy around. There always is one.

Funny how all this adds up to the fact that we will inevitably herd behind the worst person around. Maybe that’s why we suck so bad as a species.

If someone doesn’t care about themselves, why would they care about other or littering.

Well, I don’t think there’s a single answer.

I used to be a smoker. And it always pissed me off how cavalier other smokers were about just flicking a butt anywhere.

Having discussed it many times with other smokers, I gotta say the major reason for out is pure fucking laziness combined when apathy. People just don’t care, or think it doesn’t matter, and aren’t willing to put even the tiniest effort into not being assholes.

The next major reason is that smoking is basically burning a plant. There’s already a factor where you’re dropping ash, so there’s a predisposition to forgetting there’s a difference. And some people seem to think that because the cig was burning that it shouldn’t go in regular trash. Those folks are usually pretty good about using public ashtrays with a dedicated disposal container. Not all of them all the time, but more often than not.

I’m not saying I never left a butt behind (I love that phrase), but for me it was only when circumstances made it such that I wasn’t paying attention. High stress circumstances, and I wouldn’t be paying attention to what my hands were doing. I’d be done smoking, walking back to wherever and realize I didn’t have the butt with me.

There are portable options. My car didn’t come with an ashtray, but there are portable ones that cost less than a pack of cigarettes, even back when cigarettes were cheaper. There’s are also ones you can carry in a pocket or purse. I used to carry one in my pocket that was great because it was sealed well enough that you couldn’t smell anything from it.

But, barring a rare situation where the residual ember is too dangerous to stub out and then dispose of the little bit of tobacco left with a certainty of safety, there’s really zero excuse to not do that and at least carry your butt away to a receptacle of some kind, even if you’re in your own yard. But if things are that flammable, you shouldn’t be smoking to begin with.

Back when I would work the door as a bouncer at bars and clubs, I was kinda known for being pissy about it. I’d be smoking myself, see someone toss a butt and give them shit for it. “Why you fucking up my parking lot? Pick your shit up.” Benefit of being a bouncer and looking like a bouncer is you can get away with that kind of thing. Like, motherfucker, I’m standing right here next to a giant ashtray with a disposal bucket for the butts. Don’t just drop your trash. My boss at the one place said I was scaring customers. I said good, now the place won’t look trashy, and you can get customers that aren’t lazy assholes that leave the parking lot littered up. Besides, if a bouncer can’t put a little fear into lazy assholes, why do the job? That’s practically part of the benefits of the job lol.

But, yeah, the vast majority are lazy assholes. Not just the smokers, it’s anyone with something small enough they don’t think it’s worth any effort to dispose of properly. A single napkin, straws, straw wrappers, toothpicks. Cigs are just more frequent because smokers go through then in bigger numbers, so they pile up more obviously.

Most of my family are smokers, and I can tell you that smokers are often just annoying and selfish when it comes to their smoking.

My dad and stepmom insist on smoking at the fireplace because ‘the smoke goes to the chimney’ (hint: it doesn’t) despite the fact that a 9 year old lives here, and I remember when my brother dropped his cigarette on the ground in a forest (he put it out first) and when I noted that he shouldn’t do that because animals will eat the cigarette butts he drops, since there was a nest with baby birds nearby, his defense was that the birds in the city eat cigarettes and get addicted to them, this was somehow fine or something. I still fail to see the logic there, if he had any.

I was a smoker for about 20 years and quit in 2021 with Chantix.

For all but the last maybe 5 years of that, I just had cigarette butts on my mental whitelist. I was an otherwise very litter-conscious person who just didn’t consider butts litter because…? I never reasoned it out, and was like I suddenly realized I was fucking littering and then I became hyper sensitive about it.

There’s a guy at work who would squat down and chain-smoke outside the building main entrance and littered cigarette butts all over the place.

I confronted him about it one day, and asked him to throw his butts away. Now he smokes by his car and that area of the parking lot is full of cigarette butts.

Fucking disgusting.

Smokers have the most opportunities to litter.

I imagine few people create garbage multiple times a day while outside. The people who do only litter if they can’t be bothered to find a bin, so they probably rarely visit that particular place. So smokers, teenagers and truckers just have more opportunities to litter, leaving butts, wrappers and cans.

And once you’re used to littering when there’s no bin, you do it when there are bins as well.

Because smokers are usually selfish assholes. And not terribly bright.

I think this is partially just observational bias.

You only notice the smokers littering and not the ones squeezing the cherry out and pocketing the filter or throwing it away.

A lot of smokers do the above and if you ever meet them they smell next level disgusting. Their car ash tray will be full of butts, and there car will reek. They often just skoke inside, and their entire living space smells of stale tobacco. Their pants will reek because they store them in their pocket until they find a bin. But they don’t litter. The people who are trying to avoid smelling like an ash tray are the ones littering.

Ron Popeil died before he could invent a pocket ashtray.

Nicotine apparently rots the brain. I was at a bar yesterday and there was a shelf over the urinals and as many bins for snus packets as there were urinals. The bins were labelled in multiple languages that they were for snus packets. They were really obvious. And there were still snus packets in the urinals.

I don’t notice this in my country. Most bins have a cigarette bin attached and most smokers don’t just light up anywhere. It’s water bottles here instead.

Because there aren’t any fucking public trash cans and noone is carrying that shit. Same reason you see nips everywhere.