Migrant Workers Can Harvest The Cigarette Butt Crop

By: Melvin Polatnick
Submitted: 2008-03-17 15:34:19
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Keeping clean goes beyond our home. It is just as important to have clean streets, parks and beaches as it is to have a clean apartment to live in.

Every where you go there is a nasty looking cigarette butt on the ground. Not only do they look bad but they smell. When I try to lay out my blanket on the beach there is no spot that is free of them. It takes me over twenty minutes to clear the area before I can lay down my blanket. Even when I am at rest trying to look at the ocean those dam cigarette butts come into view. They are everywhere. I no longer want to go to a cigarette littered beach but enjoy the sunshine in my rear yard. The trips to the mall are also spoiled, because parking lots are full of twisted and flattened butts. The ugliest ones have a brown filter at the end, they look like poop when they are bunched together. But poop is better because it at least dries up and disappears. Something has to be done about this terrible situation because it is destroying the beauty of our country.

I am retired and have chosen to spend my last years doing something useful for the country that was so good to me. Every morning I go out into the streets with two burlap bags and a pick. I don’t return until those two bags are filled with cigarette butts. Some times it is a twelve hour day and I never take a rest. Sunday I spend examining the sidewalks and gutters preparing myself for the job that has to be done the next day. When I return home I am happy to know that my day was spent helping to make my city a cleaner place

We stand helplessly buy and watch people throw butts out car windows or just flip them on the sidewalk. But most of us are not aware of the real danger that cigarette butts pose..

A lit cigarette can ignite a forest fire
Cigarette butts can take 25 years to break down due to cellulose acetate in the filters
Butts can release toxic substances including arsenic, cadmium and lead into water as they breakdown
Animals sometimes mistake cigarettes for food which can give them digestive problems.

Besides that, cigarette butts are an eyesore.

Each year hundreds of thousands of migrant workers cross our borders to harvest the fruit and vegetable crop, and after they are done they happily return to where they came from. They have done a great job and we are thankful for it. But their job in not fully done, they have left the most important part of the harvest untouched. Trillions of cigarette butts have not been picked up and put into the burlap bags they carry on their shoulders. Our government must give them permission to continue their harvest. There has to be cigarette butt disposal sites across the nation where those migrant workers can drop off their burlap bags of butts. There they will be paid for their harvest. When the harvest is complete, they will happily go back to their country and families. Like all harvest workers they will return next year to harvest a trillion new cigarette butts.

I wake up early in the morning, and with my burlap bag and pick, I spend the day gathering cigarette butts. But I am not alone, because there are others like myself that hate those nasty looking butts all over the ground. We have formed a team, hired a flatbed truck and visit new areas each day. People greet us everywhere we go, they too hate those lousy stinking cigarette butts in their neighborhood. But unfortunately we are making no progress, as soon as we pick up a butt another one replaces it. We must turn to Mexico and their millions of harvest workers to pick up the trillions of cigarette butts that lie untouched on our streets, beaches and parks. We must do it quickly before there is no place that is not filled with that stinking brown tipped litter.

Melpol http://www.associatedcontent.com/melpol

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