Butts and their Butts

Even the cleanest campsites are usually littered with cigaret filters of varying ages, and, as I tire of picking them up, I think about the people who throw them on the ground or street or sidewalk, and I ponder what to do about it.

Juneau, Alaska, has a solution, though I don't know that the $200 fine is enforced.

People who probably don't consider themselves littering slobs toss their butts away without apparent thought. They probably don't pee on their living room carpets or spit on their dining tables, or maybe they do.

Before filtered cigarets became first popular and now almost universal, cigaret butts came apart in the first rain or after being walked on or driven over a few times. In the service, we field-stripped our butts when outdoors, scattering the tobacco and wadding the paper and, if filtered, the filter into a ball and putting it in a pocket for later disposal--in a trash can, not on the ground.

Three solutions come to mind. The easiest would be to outlaw filters on cigarets. You want to filter out and throw away most of what you just paid $40 a carton for? Get a filtered holder like the ones FDR used. Maybe they'd come back in style.

Next easiest would be perhaps to require filters to be biodegradable and soluble in water so they would disappear in the first rain.

Third, and troublesome to implement, would be to add a one-dollar filter deposit on each cigaret sold. You'd have to turn in your filters to get your money back, much as you do in states with bottle and can deposit laws.

Any one of those three options would have people howling about government restrictions, of course. So perhaps the best solution would be for smokers to refrain from being butts with their butts.