__ Proof: Smokers are Lowlife Scumbags! __
Reality_CheckŠ
Posted: March 18, 2008, 8:17 PM by Barry Hertz
City, Neighbourhoods, Kuitenbrouwer
Do not be so eager for the snow to melt. For as the drifts diminish, they
reveal the crimes we committed in the depths of winter, all the evils we
left to be buried by the snow: dog poop and lottery tickets and mostly,
cigarette butts.
After a winter with the most snow in 75 years, this spring is going to be
dirtier than most, notes Geoff Rathbone, general manager of solid waste at
the City of Toronto.
"Normally by now we would have our spring cleanup in full operation, but
because of the snow we have not been able to do that," he told me yesterday.
I swung by Yorkville to look at the mess. On Bloor Street in front of Holt
Renfrew stretches a snowbank, from Yonge Street to Bay Street, studded with
gum, cigar ends, apple cores, straws, movie tickets, Kleenex and copious
numbers of cigarette butts.
The receding snowbanks remind us painfully of one of our city's great
blights: Smokers who toss their fag ends willy-nilly. As I stood outside
Holt's, a woman put her cigarette in her mouth as she fiddled with the strap
on her friend's impossibly high cork-soled sandal. Then they both tossed
their smouldering Belmonts on the granite flagstones and walked into Holt's.
Are smokers just, basically, slobs? Having observed them for a couple of
days, I can say this: with rare exceptions, they throw their butts on the
street. But I don't blame them: they have no alternative. Laws force them
all to smoke outside, but no one gives them an ashtray.
Ashtrays can help. Outside the main doors of City Hall, where there are
three ugly cement ashtrays - the round kind with their sides studded in
pebbles -- most smokers butted out in them this week. But outside the Eaton
Centre, I saw two smokers flatten their butts on the walk next to an
ashtray.
"To be honest, even though I'm a smoker, this looks quite disgusting," says
Alexander Ascanio, an electrician smoking outside the Cadillac Fairview
building at 60 Bloor St. West, where he works. "If the building put an
ashtray you're going to keep the city more clean."
The nearby corner of Bellair and Cumberland streets is speckled with
thousands of butts.
"Unfortunately, it's that time of year, and this year is worse," says Briar
de Lange, general manager of the Bloor-Yorkville Business Improvement Area,
which counts 1,800 members. She's optimistic that new ashtray-equipped trash
cans Astral Media is rolling out this year as part of the city's
"co-ordinated street
furniture" will help.
"Hopefully smokers will take that five extra seconds" to use the ashtray,
she said.
We'll see. Right now there is a trash bin at Bloor and Yonge and one at
Bloor and Bay, but nothing in between; I doubt a smoker will walk half a
block to butt out.
But Mr. Rathbone promises 12,000 of the new trash bins, compared with 5,000
silver bins the city has right now.
Will smokers use them? The city has a pilot project with the Atrium on Bay:
ashtrays bolted to the sides of the building. Each has three 3 cm-diametre
holes for butts. Several of these were full yesterday, and several had small
fires smouldering inside. Yesterday, I watched five smokers outside the
Ontario Lottery offices on Dundas St. W. drop their butts on the sidewalk
next to an ashtray and then go back inside.
The city rarely tags smokers with its $305 fine for littering, Mr. Rathbone
says, because there are no ashtrays. Once Toronto provides spots for butts,
"this would now open the door to more enforcement," he says.
That could help. Ashtray, Ont., is not a pretty place.