The New York city sidewalk is a battleground. Residents take issue with tourists who walk too slowly. Singletons get annoyed when confronted with double strollers in their way. And non-dog-owners who must swerve to avoid a steaming pile may have the urge to curse Lassie, and her owner, who failed to stoop to scoop.  And in this weekend’s Complaint Box in the Metropolitan section, Josh Bell took issue with smokers who leave a “never-ending trail” of cigarette butts that extends block after block, and even in grassy areas and on stoops.  “I have a message for them: The world is not your ashtray. I am tired of seeing your trash covering nearly every sidewalk in this city. You see those garbage cans on every corner? You can stub out your cigarette on the edge and put it in there. At the very least, you could toss your butts into the gutter and the street sweepers will get them.”  Many smokers admitted to carelessly tossing unwanted filters to the city’s streets, but most everyone was concerned with the aftereffects of this bad habit. There’s even a Facebook club.  Nonsmokers took the opportunity to waft their complaints toward smokers in general, but the real issue at hand was how to dispose of those nonbiodegradable filters. Gutters are just tributaries into our rivers and oceans, as many readers pointed out. But if the trash can is full of kindling just waiting to burn, what to do? Aside from the obvious solution of not throwing cigarette butts on the ground, readers looked to other cities and countries – San Francisco, Paris, Italy – where the street sweepers are ready and equipped to dispose of them, or taxes applied to cigarettes are dedicated toward the cost of their proper disposal.  Readers offered possible remedies for the problem that varied in seriousness and scope. One of the most appetizing: What about creating an edible filter?  Here, unedited, are several comments and solutions we especially liked:  This is a problem that cannot be solved with punishment. It is currently a crime to litter, but do we really want the police to spend their time ticketing the few smokers who they observe tossing their butts?  An article earlier this week on a proposal for a $.01 deposit per cigarette to be paid when the butt is returned to either the store where purchased or a recycling center is sheer genius. Few smokers would take the trouble to collect their butts – they would still drop them – but the homeless population (the same people who pick up all those cans and bottles) would pick the streets clean.  I’m a smoker, and am part of the “tiny, tiny minority” (as the author put it) of smokers who properly disposes of cigarette butts.  I agree that smokers should be more mindful as to how they dispose of their butts.  For fellow smokers out there who are heading to the beach this weekend, try what I always do – put the cigarette out in the sand, and place the butts in something you can easily dispose of when leaving the beach. Just because we choose to pollute our bodies with cigarettes doesn’t give us the right to choose the same for land & sea animals.  The problem is staring us right in the face. I work in midtown and am a smoker. The 34th St. clean up crew frequents the sidewalk in front of my building, every 30 minutes or so to clean up the butts that have collected from the previous half hour. If the city put cigarette-butt receptacles on the sidewalks, and they were as common as trash cans, I’d use them and I’m sure a lot of other people would too. After the city installs a few thousand of these, do a little PR. It’s like if tomorrow, there were no trash cans anywhere in the city, and Bloomberg proposed hiring 4 times as many sidewalk sweepers to solve the problem.  Why can’t some mad evil scientist genetically engineer pigeons to eat cigarette butts, thereby creating something useful for pigeons to do?  I was in Italy recently and noticed that the garbage cans had ashtrays affixed to the tops (the ashtrays were basically a narrow bar, so the cans could still be emptied by simply dumping them upside-down).  Why not have those in New York? Would the Bloomberg administration be against them because it acknowledges that people smoke?
In response to this weekend's Complaint Box, readers traded smoke signals on what to do about abandoned cigarette butts on city sidewalks.