Those $0.05 Deposits Work on Cans — How about Cigarette Butts?

In many states, New York included, there is a $0.05 deposit on aluminum cans. The deposit is designed to provide an economic incentive to people so that they recycle their cans instead of just throwing them in the garbage when they’re finished. The program works beautifully; however, like many such programs, the way it works isn’t necessarily the way you’d immediately picture such a system to function. People that buy the cans and pay the extra $0.05 are rarely the people that end up collecting the nickel when they’re done with it — for them, the deposit is just an added tax on cans that they are still going to throw away. Instead, the people that benefit are those who are able to collect cans out of the garbage and off the street and then turn them in for the deposit. The economic incentive turns an otherwise difficult task — collecting and sorting a city’s worth of cans from the garbage — into a task done readily by people that otherwise may have few other work alternatives.

As I walked around Manhattan yesterday, I was thinking about what other areas a well-devised deposit program could improve. When I passed a group of cigarette smokers, an idea came to me — how about a 1 or 2 cent deposit on each cigarette that could be reclaimed when a smoker (or anyone) turned in the cigarette butt? The streets of New York, and just about any other city for that matter, are littered with the filters of hundreds of cigarettes. The beautiful beaches in Miami are marred by the half-smoked remains of hundred of cigarettes. What if we gave an economic incentive to people to collect this ugly trash and turn it in?

Cities like New York currently have ineffective systems in place to clean litter, which consists mainly of spent cigarettes. The way it works now is that workers walk along the sidewalks with brooms and dustpans and sweep stray bits of trash into the dustpans. It works to some degree, but there is no incentive for the worker to make sure to get every single item. By instituting the deposit system of cigarettes, cities would reduce the need for these workers, and replace them by an army of “freelancers”. Within a week, the streets and gutters could be free of all remnants of cigarettes.

I can foresee a few criticisms of this plan. It’s unsanitary and could spread disease. While questionably true, I would argue that a homeless person who collects 200 cigarette butts and then buys a sandwich at a deli is going to be far healthier than one who eats a sandwich or other food from the trash. Cigarettes already have enough taxes added on to them. While I am not in favor of taxing, part of the deposit could be offset by the reduced cleaning costs to the city. The other portion could be written into part of an environmental-type budget. It’s difficult to accurately count the cigarette butts. While there is no machine that currently exists to count them, I guarantee that such a system could quickly be built given some economic incentive. I picture basically a two-stage device — the first stage would be a rough filter that would allow items the size of cigarette butts though, and the second stage some sort of device that measures the volume of material.

What are we waiting for? Enacting this simple solution will reduce litter, give basic jobs to hundreds of people, and provide a (admittedly small, but still existent) boost to the economies of cities.