Butterflies
Use A Portable Ashtray
Quit your very specific littering.
While touring Britain in the apple-powered Zerobus I’ve observed a curious littering quirk: Cigarette butts seem to think they don’t count as litter, lying on the ground as if they’ve never heard of a thing called bin. I let that pass for the likes of pebbles, leaves and sticks because they don’t know any better but cigarette butts aren’t getting off that lightly.
There’s a degree of common sense here: you can’t put a lit cigarette into your pocket because it’s a bad influence and will only encourage other things in your pocket to get on fire too. They’re the archetypal bad apples, if apples were flammable and cancerous. So what’s a black-lunged Zero to do? They can get a personal, portable, pocketable ashtray.
A portable ashtray is a pocket-sized, fire retardant case that can extinguish and then carry spent cigarettes, so instead of lying on the street they can wait until their owner finds a bin. That’s a good thing: The Keep Britain Tidy campaign reported a massive rise in cigarette littering following the smoking ban, as smokers were forced from indoor ashtrays to outdoor outsides. On-street loitering leads to on-street littering, but personal ashtrays are fighting the fight. They’re cheap, reusable and customisable, they’re endorsed by that influencer you like, and are willing to carry chewed gum so we don’t have to see that shit either. If you’re lucky they can get one for free from one of the clean up campaigns that are always running, and spend the two quid it would have cost on chemotherapy.
They’re good. Go get.
Use a portable ashtray
You dirty bugger
Cos it'd be nice
Zeroism
Related Blog Posts
No success like failure
You join me in the middle of another climate anxiety freakout, the beginning having begun several years ago and the end expected roughly forty minutes after my death. As deadly heatwaves clobber half of Europe, I’ve relocated my climate panic from background hum to front, centre and screaming in my face.
Alone in electric dreams
After 11 months of dithering, three nights of barely any sleep, and one day of sweating with guilt in a showroom, I finally bought an electric car. Here’s how it’s been:
Public charging, it turns out, is a piece of piss.
The Big Plastic Count: World’s Worst Typo Successfully Avoided
Among the million things we need to do to avert climate breakdown, kicking the arse out of plastic is one of the most urgent. Plastic comes from dirty-bad oil, gas and coal, using about 4.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and about 6% of coal-fired electricity in its production. We’re bringing on the sixth mass extinction for the sake of shrink-wrapped broccoli.
Doing nothing for the environment
In my withered, Covid-infested state I find myself doing less and less for the big battles we need to win: Yer climate breakdown, yer rise of fascism, yer eating the rich. But recently I’ve discovered a critical area of climate activism that requires even less effort than doing very little: Doing nothing at all! By which I mean I’m buying less shit.
9 life hacks for ignoring the IPCC climate report
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC – issued its latest report this week, pointing out how monumentally fucked we are because we like cars, burgers and mass extinctions. It makes for grim reading – but only if you actually read it. Here are nine ways you can avoid giving it any thought at all!
An almost buyer’s guide to electric cars 2: Electric car boogaloo
Desperate to avoid petrol I hired an electric car for the purposes of hard science. I requisitioned a Renault Zoe for a few days, rented a lab coat and three pens for its pocket, bought a clipboard outright and began the grand experiment. The key tests were how well the battery lasted with my commute and the business of social work, how quickly it drained when parked overnight, how big a pain in the arse public charge points are, and how often I’d have to use the buggers.
An almost buyer’s guide to electric cars, maybe
Back in the arse-end of 2019 I finally ditched my car, having decided humanity was marginally more important than an easy commute. But then Covid hit. And hit me right in the face. Almost two years later I’m still having trouble walking, still working fully from home and only just starting full time hours. I need a car. Which means I need an electric car, which means a lot of expense…
COP26 midterm report: Must try harder
We’ve made it halfway through COP26. It’s been a week of photo ops and erasures, announcements and sucker-punches, protests and Borises being colossal shits. On the surface there have been some decent announcements…
Climate anxiety: The self-righteousest of all anxieties
And so we find ourselves on the eve of COP26, where highfalutin delegates from around 200 countries will come together in Glasgow to either unite the world to tackle climate change or to talk shit, greenwash their failures and prove virtue signalling is a real thing after all. In preparation I’ve been hard at work on my soul-crushing climate anxiety. This requires long nights lying awake fretting, long days doomscrolling social media. It requires your heart pounding against your ribs so hard it actually makes a noise.
