Let’s leave this world better for the little ones we love

ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

The World Health Organization says 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are flipped, tossed, spit, spat, dropped, pitched or otherwise discarded every year.

On any given day in the United States, where about 11.5% of us are said to smoke, roughly 9.7 billion butts become litter, all of them capable of lasting a decade or more before breaking down. The chemicals they release into the soil — never mind what they release into the smoker — last a lot longer than that.

How does somebody make this determination in numbers?

Guesswork, I imagine, which wouldn’t be as hard as it sounds. You take Florida, you estimate 9.6 billion get flipped out the window onto our highways and roads, and then you go count the rest. Most of those probably lie on either side of the George Washington Bridge in northern New Jersey and parts of Manhattan Island, where a pack of cigarettes now costs about $17, including federal and state tax.

Good news for smokers, though: Florida, which ranks No. 1 in so many things, falls to an embarrassing 33 in average cost of a pack of cigarettes, which is $8 in the U.S., not counting taxes, statistics show; the pack price is about $6.50 here, plus tax. So if you live in New York and smoke, by all means, move to Florida. And welcome!

Even if Americans only toss half the estimated number of discarded butts onto the floor of our national existence every year, it’s a singular opportunity for the next president. This is true of all litter, but especially cigarettes.

Whoever takes the White House — Kamala Harris, Donald Trump or Big Bertha — he or she should reestablish the Works Progress Administration first put in place on May 6, 1935, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He signed it into law as an executive order the same afternoon the Boston Red Sox beat the Cleveland Indians 2 to 1 in a two-hour game in Cleveland before a massive crowd of 800, probably a good half of them smoking what people then sometimes called “coffin nails,” and desperate for a job.

As soon as we get past November and December this year, the new president could order the new WPA to hire every single unemployed or underpaid American in need of a modestly comfortable living wage of $100,000 or so per year so they can rent one-bedroom apartments, and order them out to pick up cigarette butts.

In a year, we’d have this country cleaned up. But only of cigarette butts, and only if smokers all agreed to stop tossing theirs on the ground and instead recycle them.

People used to smoke more, I think — that’s just my impression — but there weren’t as many people. The population of the United States in 1935 was just over 127 million, with only 1.6 million of them living in Florida, about the count for Palm Beach County these days.

Fortunately for them, cigarettes didn’t have cellulose acetate filters in 1935, the plastic filters. So when they smoked and tossed the butts, they weren’t really disfiguring the planet. Just themselves.

My grandparents on the Rocky Mountain side weren’t smokers or drinkers, but on the other side, in New York, they died of one or the other, or both. And the WPA today wouldn’t be asked to do what it did, apparently, for my clean-living, cow-chasing mountain folk. Men came up the rough road 30 miles from the nearest town and in that rocky soil, at 9,000 feet, dug a deep hole in the ground near the barn. Then they mounted a handmade outhouse on top of it. The dang thing is still there.

The next president shouldn’t order anybody in the new WPA to build any outhouses. That onerous task should be saved for the litterers themselves, especially people who dump cans, bottles, boxes, plastic bags from tiny to huge and discarded plastic toys or even old cars and boats.

Wherever there’s an unprotected stretch of woods with a slender road winding into it these days, somebody shoves something off the back of a truck or out the trunk of a car, it seems.

And then they usually pitch a few cigarette butts into the litter, topping it off with a plastic flourish.

They’re risk-takers and wealth-wasters. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year. (It) cost the United States more than $600 billion in 2018, including more than $240 billion in healthcare spending.”

And that was 6 years ago. No doubt the costs have gone up, like milk and eggs. A note about the casualty count, where the cost is almost unimaginably high: That’s roughly as many Americans killed by smoking every year as Americans killed in World War II in four years.

Maybe littering isn’t as bad as all that, after all. In fact, it might be a protest by honorable people who really do care what we look like.

The late celebrated writer Edward Abbey offered his own explanation, this way: “Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly; it’s the highway that is ugly.”

OK, I can see that.

Let me add, though, that I do not litter the Florida highway with my beer cans or cigarette butts. Or anything else.

The other day, up a single-lane, dirt-and-fill dead end near my house, somebody discarded some plastic toy junk and a big laminated box that said, “Only The Best For The Little One You Love!” Some cigarette butts lay near it.

I think we can leave something better than that for the little ones we love. ¦

The post Let’s leave this world better for the little ones we love first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .