Crazy enough to work

Mainers smoke 2.3 billion cigarettes a year, 96 percent of which have filters. You’ll find the discarded remains of that 2.2 billion littering beaches, parks, sidewalks and roadsides, on top of the non-decomposing remains of the previous year’s 2.2 billion, on top of the…

Used cigarette filters are the most ubiquitous of litter; the ugly, chemically imbued cylinders of non-biodegradable plastic fiber accumulate everywhere and never go away. Nice people who would not dream of tossing a tissue or a paper cup on the ground flick butts without a second thought and, in addition to the unsanitary and unsightly aspects of this inconsiderate behavior, there are real costs. It is estimated that Maine businesses and government entities spend as much as $100 million annually picking up cigarette litter; butts tossed from cars cause roughly 10 percent of the state’s forest fires, 60 or 70 a year.

Beyond scolding smokers to pick up after themselves or asking police officers to busy themselves pulling over butt flickers, there is a proposed remedy that could actually work. It would make Maine a cleaner place, create private-sector jobs and public-sector revenue, and, best of all, put the burden where it belongs – on the smoker.

The only problem is that it sounds crazy, but only at first. It’s LD 258, An Act to Establish Returnable Tobacco Products, and it works a lot like the Bottle Bill, another crazy idea Maine had 25 years ago that turned out to work like a dream.

Every cigarette sold in Maine would have “ME 5 cents” stamped on the filter, much like the deposit information on a can or bottle. Those who buy a pack of cigarettes would pay the deposit, $1 per pack of 20, and get it back when the filters, collected and saved in, say, a plastic sandwich bag, are taken to the same redemption center where they take their cans and bottles. Redemption centers, by the way, love the idea; they’d get a penny for their trouble, just like they do with cans and bottles, and they could really use the money. Those who pick up cans and bottles for extra money of for fund-raisers would have an additional source of income; a group of schoolkids in Waterville, for example, recently picked up what would have been more than $500 worth of butts in just an hour.

Returnable cigarette filters is a new idea anywhere and there’s no way to know what the return rate would be. If it were half, the unclaimed deposits would add $47 million to state revenues, so it is entirely likely it would at least equal the $36 million Gov. King’s proposed 26-cent cigarette tax increase would produce. The governor’s proposal, to make smokers pay a more realistic share of the health-care costs they impose upon society, is well intentioned but it is, after all, a tax increase and it doesn’t do anything for litter. The returnable idea is better because the only people hurt are smokers who leave a mess for others.

LD 258 has a public hearing Tuesday before the Legislature’s Business and Economic Development Committee. The tobacco lobby opposes it with these arguments: Cigarette manufacturers won’t want to bother stamping filters just for Maine, so cigarettes won’t be available here. (These are the same manufacturers, incidentally, that brag of being able to produce cigarettes finely tailored to specific markets worldwide.) Stores will then close, jobs will be lost and (lobbyists actually say this with a straight face) low-income people, the predominant group among smokers, will be denied the one pleasure they have in life.

These arguments are remarkably similar to those used against the Bottle Bill back in 1976, when opponents predicted a Maine devoid of soda and beer and up to its eyebrows in disease-harboring empties.

How lawmakers will deal to this new and innovative idea its first time out remains to be seen, but it will eventually be dealt with. The question of what to do about the billions upon billions of cigarette filters piling up here, the trillions throughout the country and around the world, is – like the filters themselves – not going to just go away.