No, but for some reason people think throwing cigarette butts on the ground and out of car windows isn't littering.
(Also I live in NYC these days, but I used to live in SF).
I never chuck my butts on the ground, if there isn't a rubbish bin nearby, I'll either put the butt back in my packet, or just put it in my pocket. When I see friends tossing their butts I always have a go at them for littering, most just don't even realise what they're doing is wrong.
I suspect (as an exsmoker) that it's more about the availability of cigarette receptacles. most smokers I know are willing to dispose of butts when there's a convenient place to put them, but are not willing to carry them around until they find a suitable place. used cigarettes make your clothes smell a lot worse that merely smoking outside.
A study commissioned by SF Public Works in 2009 determined that the direct costs for cigarette related litter in San Francisco could be remediated with a 22 cent per pack tax. The actual tax in San Francisco is 85 cents per pack known as the "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee". The 2009 study claimed around 30 million packs/year are sold in San Francisco which would be roughly 25 million dollars a year in taxes collected for this purpose with an estimated cleanup cost of only 7-8 million. So not only are cigarette smokers already paying for the cleanup they are paying nearly four times the actual cleanup cost for their litter.
The 2009 study: https://sfpublicworks.org/sites/default/files/tobacco_litter...
The tax: https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette
I blame the lack of a real winter. In the northeast people quit smoking when it was banned indoors, because they didn't want to smoke in the freezing cold snow, whereas in SF people just go outside all year around.
It's not uncommon to see less well-off people walk around town, putting a little bit of rubbish into any bin they pass. It's risky, because fines for dumping household waste in public bins are steep.
Disposing of household waste is quite expensive here, only waste in "official" bin bags is collected, and they're over 1eur/ piece. It's a contributing factor to poverty, and, in my opinion, to fly tipping. After all, why pay for expensive bin bags when you can just chuck your litter anywhere with impunity?
It might be a little trite but I sometimes think the Eastern approach of Shame is more effective than the Western approach of Guilt in curbing small social transgressions.
On the streets of NYC, I don't really notice the cigarettes, but I do notice the enormous amount of plastic bags (much of it stuck in trees), plastic or paper cups, straws, takeout containers. And gum. If you ever look at a sidewalk and see dark splotches [1], that's discarded chewing gum. It's absolutely everywhere. Not as invasive, of course, just odd.
I don't know what SF is like, but NYC has a fascinatingly ugly system [2] where you're supposed to put trash and recycling out on the sidewalk for it to be collected, where it's effectively temporary litter. NYC's sanitation workers are notoriously careless about handling the trash, and my pet theory is that a sizable portion of street litter actually originates in the sanitation workers spilling trash on pickup day.
NYC's trash problem is also exacerbated by the fact that landlords can get away with not doing their part in keeping the outside of the building litter-free.
[1] https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/S...
DSNY, aka Sanitation, does not pick up trash from commercial businesses, only residencies. Businesses have to hire a private carter. Private carters are notorious for not giving two fucks. They have also been responsible for many pedestrian accidents as well.
I have never really noticed a surge in trash in the streets after DSNY comes by. Though, after schools opened, my house is around the corner from a public school and I see an immediate surge of snack wrappers tossed on my lawn. Same with the building I own near another school, wrapper trash all over.
Some kind of data needs to be collected by a team like this team an based on that data the offending brands get bills.
Besides that I think littering could benefit from heavy fines, the same way speeding tickets helped with traffic safety.
Basically a near little free environment should be our aim, I do not see why cannot make this happen.
It's unfortunately not realistic to do for every kind of wrapper. Although maybe a weight-based rough measurement might work: I. e. a cents/gram of packaging, and your recycling is spot-checked for contamination. It seems slightly too convoluted, invasive, and draconian even for me, a German green. But might be a possible application of AI ("estimate the number of product wrappings in this heap").
And at the end of all that, if a company still produces products that we know will probably end as packaging litter... hell yeah, charge them (and implicitly the littering consumers) for that negative externality.
Background: My friends, Elena and Felipe, and I have been picking up litter 3x per week on Polk Street for year now. We logged all the litter we picked up to see what we can find. After a year picking up we decided to see what we can learn from the data and we wrote an article with the results.
We used the https://www.rubbish.love, which I helped program, to track all the items.
Is it just a standard grabber but with a cellphone holder and some kind of bluetooth trigger embedded in the "grabbing handle" that triggers the phone to take a picture?
More trash cans would be great, but they absolutely won't fix the problem when people regularly empty their contents onto the street.
In Disneyland, there was more litter until they put trashcans everywhere.
Living in SF is like living inside a garbage dump combined with a sewer. It’s insane.
I keep a pack of gum in my car at all times just in case I have a drink socializing somewhere. Having alcoholic beverages on your breath when you get pulled over for something unrelated can make the experience far more annoying, unnecessarily.
Monday, 4/22, was Earth Day, after Good Friday, Passover, Easter, and of course 4/20 - so a near-perfect storm for SF.
I really like that approach to quantitate where the hotspots are and to deliver bins accordingly.
yeah I guess so
