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

 

Photo credit: Health Education Council (UK)

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