It’s about litter – no ifs, ands or exceptions here

My first reaction – perhaps yours, as well – to the bill that would put a nickel deposit on cigarette butts was that the proposal created unparalleled opportunity to make butt jokes. This was followed by fretting about such practicalities as who would want to go around collecting the stinky, soggy things and what would be done with them.

First reactions aren’t necessarily the best ones. The butt jokes weren’t all they were cracked up to be and the practicalities are nothing that we haven’t dealt with before. LD 258, the Returnable Tobacco Products bill, is a good piece of legislation. More importantly, even if it doesn’t pass this session, it’s a good idea whose time will come, in Maine and just about everywhere else.

Here’s why. Mainers smoke a lot of cigarettes, more than 2 billion a year (closer to 2.3 billion, according to the Maine Lung Association). Look around parking lots, sidewalks, roadsides, beaches, parks and you’ll see where the remnants of a lot of those 2 billion end up – on the ground. Even if cigarettes were as safe as mother’s milk and their use a pleasure to both smoker and bystander, they are a major litter problem. No offense to our smoking friends out there, but some of you are making one big mess.

How big? Each smoker consumes roughly 10,000 cigarettes a year. The accumulated filters of each, at about one-tenth of an ounce each, weigh 3.75 pounds; the filters of Maine’s 2 billion a whopping 750,000 pounds. There’s no way of knowing how many are disposed of properly, but some rudimentary research suggests that, nationwide, it’s far less than half. Cigarette filters, though they appear cottony, actually are plastic – they biodegrade at about the speed of a rock and they’re piling up fast. (Future geologists surely will wonder about the packed-down layer of cellulose acetate they’ll find upon excavating down to our epoch.)

Outdoors enthusiasts should know that fish, birds and other wildlife swallow them; cigarette butts are by far the dominant debris picked up in coastal cleanups; on average, about one-tenth of Maine’s forest fires – 50 to 70 a year – are caused by tossed butts.

Incidentally, this form of littering – done by people who wouldn’t dream of committing any other form of littering – costs plenty to clean up. The driving forces behind this bill are Danny Lafayette and Peter Daigle, owner and CEO, respectively, of Lafayette Hotels, a chain of 12 inns here and in New Hampshire. Mr. Daigle, who has become quite the expert on the subject, says the labor to pick up the cigarette litter around one business can cost $4,000 a year. Multiply that by the number of businesses in Maine, and it’s easily $100 million wasted.

LD 258, by the way, is sponsored by Rep. Joseph Brooks of Winterport. Rep. Brooks is a Democrat and a former employee of this newspaper, neither of which should detract from the merits of the bill.

Here’s how it would work. Every cigarette sold in Maine would have ”ME – 5?” stamped on the filter, much like what you find on soda cans. The smoker pays a $1 deposit on every pack (20 in a pack times a nickel). The butts are collected in, say, clear plastic baggies and taken to a redemption center. The collector gets the nickel back, the center gets a penny. Assuming a redemption rate of 50 percent (pure guesswork, since nobody’s ever done this before), there would be a surplus for the state of $47 million.

Incidentally, I stopped by two redemption centers the other day. Both said they’d welcome the work, could use the extra income and wouldn’t find counting butts it any yuckier than sorting cans and bottles. One guy, who’s been in the business since Maine passed the Bottle Bill back in 1976, said the objections he’s hearing now sound a lot like the lame objections he heard back then.

So I went through some 1976 news clippings and got an eyeful of 25-year-old lame objections. The nickel deposit on cans and bottles, opponents warned, would be an onerous burden upon thirsty Mainers and the end of life as we know it. Bottlers would refuse to stamp the containers, shelves would be bare, stores would close, the collected cans and bottles would breed disease. The reality, of course, is that 20 states followed Maine’s lead, a new small-business opportunity was created, it’s hard to find a place in the state where you can’t buy a soda, one thing you never see along the side of a Maine road is a tossed soda can. Other than that, the Bottle Bill has been a total flop.

The tobacco lobby is already trotting out its lame objections, calling it a new tax (it’s not tax, of course, for those smokers considerate enough to pick up after themselves, but it easily could raise as much or more than the 26-cent tax increase Gov. King proposes). Manufacturers wouldn’t want to bother with the filter stamp, as if they’re going to give up a market where they sell 117 million packs a year (Mr. Daigle – I told you he knows a lot about this – has documents from Big Tobacco in which they brag about how easy it is to tailor a product to a specific market). Maine should just enforce its anti-littering laws (as if we really want our state troopers pulling people over for flicking butts out the window). Most smokers (this is great) are poor and this deposit/return scheme would be an onerous burden upon poor Mainers and rob them of one of the few pleasures they have.

Anyway, LD 258 gets a hearing next Tuesday before the Legislature’s Business and Economic Development Committee. Expect to hear whining about Maine’s anti-business climate, griping about meddling busybodies and a lot of butt-oriented banter. And although this bill may not pass this time, the question of why smokers who don’t dispose of their cigarettes properly should be able to leave a mess for everyone else has now been asked and it is not going to go away. That’s the bottom line.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.