Stop smoking on campus
October 5, 2017
Our school and many others across the nation are in trouble environmentally.
As you may have noticed around campus, students have specific areas where they are allowed to smoke cigarettes — mostly in the parking lots. However, are those cigarettes butts being recycled properly, and if not how is it affecting our campus and our environment?
The Philadelphia Daily News reported, “Some 13 landscapers spend 10 hours a week picking up discarded cigarettes at an estimated cost of $150,000.”
Spending that much money from a school’s tight budget to pick up improperly discarded cigarette butts highlights just how big an issue this might be.
Keeping our school clean and safe is important not just for students and staff, but also for the student-parents who bring their children to daycare in the Child Study Center.
It is important to keep children safe from toxic cigarette butts. Butts carelessly thrown on the ground can be dangerous for children playing outside.
An report from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov says, “Two separate campus-wide cleanups were conducted by student volunteers at San Diego State University (SDSU) and at University of California San Diego (UCSD). In one hour, 63 volunteers at SDSU collected 23,885 butts, and 17 volunteers at UCSD collected 6,525 cigarette butts. The average number of cigarette butts picked up per individual was 379.1 at SDSU and 383.8 at UCSD.
I have seen lots of cigarette butts littering the LMC campus and even witnessed some students smoking cigarettes in areas where there are “NO SMOKING” signs, including one that reads, “Keep our school beautiful and don’t smoke.”
The article “Tobacco Control” has proposed that “smoke-free policies on campus could have far-reaching effects not only in reducing smoking behavior on campus and ground cleanup costs, but also on the environment.
Campus cigarette waste cleanup can be utilized to call attention to the issue of cigarette butt waste in the environment.”
Reducing smoking on campus is important because here at LMC we also have animals that feed on the grass, exposing them to the toxic cigarette waste, which is unhealthy and sad.
In addition, cigarette butts can cause a fire in less than a minute, threatening the school and the surrounding environment. Cigarette Butt Litter reported that, “according to the National Fire Protection Association, cigarette-caused fires result in more than 1,000 civilian deaths, 3,000 critical injuries (many among firefighters), and $400 million in direct property damage each year.”
Even though LMC has not yet had a damaging fire as a result of smoldering cigarette butts, that fact does not mean it cannot happen in the future.
According to Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights more than 1,400 colleges in the United States ban smoking on campus.
The majority of these campuses are completely tobacco-free but students might still feel the need to smoke, regardless of the consequences.
Focusing on the issue of smoking can have a positive effect on those who do light up on campus.
Signs help them remember to recycle their cigarette butts to keep the school beautiful, safe from fire and toxic free. This would benefit everyone who attends, no just the individual.
Schools everywhere should sponsor activities to give smokers information on the results of smoking on themselves and the environment, and tips on how to be environmentally thoughtful if they opt to continue smoking.
Michael J McFadden
Oct 6, 2017 at 8:00 am
If litter is truly such a driving concern, why not designated a few comfortable indoor lounge/break areas with chairs and tables and ashtrays for the campus smokers? That would certainly seem to make good sense, no?
Of course if the litter issue is simply being used as yet another weapon to attack a despised and relative defenseless minority group, such a suggestion will never even be considered.
Somehow I suspect the latter is the case.
In terms of giving the students information on the effects of smoking on the environment, two areas frequently brought up are air and water pollution.
Of course you’ll never see a comparison of the pollution caused by the tonnage of cigarettes burned worldwide compared to that of the tonnage of forest fires. Why not? Because forest fires contribute roughly 1,000 times as much burning vegetable matter and smoke to the environment… and yet themselves are seen as a minor player compared to industry and automobiles.
As for water pollution you’ll hear how a tenth of a cigarette butt in a liter of water will eventually kill half the water fleas in that liter. Sounds scary when you think about the 5 trillion cigarette butts smokers generate every year, right?
Of course you’ll never see the analysis showing that to reach that tenth of a butt/liter concentration for the Earth’s 2.3 SEXTILLION liters of water, the world’s smokers would have to throw every single butt they smoke into the water system for the NEXT 80 MILLION YEARS before half the water fleas would die. Oh, and if larger fish are a concern, they’re much less sensitive. Even minnows need a hundred times the concentration of butts before half of them die. I.E. it would take 8 BILLION years before those dedicated smokey litterbugs would manage to kill off half the minnows.
Hmmm…. that’s a bit longer than the planet has been in existence, no?
Think about those points before you vote for another attack on colleges’ favorite whipping dogs these days, the only minority group it’s still politically correct to hate.
Michael J. McFadden
Philadelphia, PA
Vinny Gracchus
Oct 5, 2017 at 7:58 pm
There is no threat to others from second hand smoke under normal conditions. Smoking bans were/are imposed to force the incremental prohibition of smoking and ultimately all tobacco and nicotine use. Even tobacco control activists acknowledge that outdoor bans are designed to denormalize smoking and not about risks from second hand smoke.
As a reminder see: Bayer, R. and Bachynski KE, “Banning Smoking In Parks And On Beaches: Science, Policy, And The Politics Of Denormalization,” Health Aff, July 2013 Vol. 32, no. 7, 1291-1298. The abstract from that paper reads:
“Campaigns to limit tobacco use started in the 1970s and have led to bans on public smoking, which have been extended to parks and beaches. A review of state and local statutes shows that during 1993–2011, smoking was banned in 843 parks and on 150 beaches across the United States. Three justifications for these restrictions have been invoked: the risk of passive smoke to nonsmokers, the pollution caused by cigarette butts, and the long-term risks to children from seeing smoking in public. Our analysis of the evidence for these claims found it far from definitive and in some cases weak. What, then, accounts for the efforts to impose such bans? We conclude that the impetus is the imperative to denormalize smoking as part of a broader public health campaign to reduce tobacco-related illness and death. Although invoking limited evidence may prove effective in the short run, it is hazardous for public health policy makers, for whom public trust is essential.”