Qivaro It’s time for a refundable deposit on cigarette butts f you saw someone pouring a Styrofoam cup of mercury, lead and arsenic onto the street, the grass or into the river, would that bother you? A similar act happens so often in every city on the planet and yet hardly anyone bats an eyelash. According to anti-smoking website whyquit.com, smokers drop an average of two billion cigarette butts on to the ground every single day—complete with non- biodegradable acetate filters and their slew of poisonous chemicals. These butts leach their chemicals into the soil and can get washed into our rivers or eaten by animals. an PA) i AL m Just 200 butts contain enough nicotine to kill Serine a | a human. Obviously litter laws don’t work and AY Ltt See based on the number of butts you see on \G\8\ 1 the ground in front of Douglas College and other buildings public ashtrays don’t work either. Smokers are either too cool or too lazy to walk three steps to butt out. It’s time to do something different. I believe the government should implement a per- butt deposit on every single cigarette sold. Perhaps begin with two cents per butt with \ = ad | the possibility of raising it until tangible results are seen. The list of positives on this action is endless. If implemented it would not cost their habit. The poor and the homeless would benefit in much the same way that deposits Importantly, this deposit would finally hold retailers of cigarettes to account. The retailer has often been able to shirk any on cans and bottles have been providing a responsibility for peddling death sticks associated with smoking. Butt collectors would be able to take their butts back to any cigarette selling retailer to receive the refund. Retailers would be responsible prudent smokers anything. All it would source of income for them and we don’t see require them to do is take responsibility for many of those littering the streets. and I believe it is time they played a role in the process of combating the problems www.yummyweb.com By Nikalas Kryzanowski, Opinions Editor The internet has outdone itself yet again. It was bound to happen sooner or later and just in time for dinner! Yummyweb is a comprehensive database of Vancouver- area restaurants designed to make ordering in on those cold and rainy nights as easy as pie. Apparently it’s been around for five years, but unless I’ve been living under a rock, I don’t think it’s gotten the attention it deserves. As an eater of food, all you have to do is browse through the menus of over 130 area restaurants, all categorized by style. Add the menu and combo items to your cart. The site calculates your total along with all the taxes and delivery fees (if any), once you find out the grand total click send. Your order is automatically faxed to the chosen restaurant and within ten minutes you’ll receive a confirmation call from the restaurant then thirty minutes later you’ll have a belly full of chow. Hooray for no more misunderstandings on the phone, no more outdated flyers and maybe most importantly, you’ll know your final total before you send your order off. Best of all you can discover awesome new restaurants every time. The toughest part of ordering in will be the fights over what to get! for the processing and proper disposal. Retailers—if you don’t want to deal with butts, then stop selling cigarettes. It’s as simple as that. A two-cent deposit would add about 40 cents to the upfront cost of a regular pack of smokes and should make smokers think twice before flicking their butts on the ground or even better, it might make them think twice before picking up the habit. As well, the extra revenue on butts that never get returned would be able to fund environmental or anti-smoking programs. Such a program does have detractors including the state of Maine which voted against a five cent deposit back in 2001 on grounds that it feared smokers would travel out of state to buy cigarettes. To that I ask— do people make special trips out of state and province to buy pop and booze just to avoid paying a refundable deposit? Not so much. BC had a fledgling deposit movement about eight months ago. Three Langley men intended to take the idea of ten cents per butt to lawmakers but were shot down by none other than the Recycling Council of BC which said that “collecting and storing chemical-laden butts could raise toxic waste issues.” Really, is it better to store toxic waste in a contained facility where it can be properly monitored or should the dangerous waste be left unfettered in the middle of the park, the street and the beach, right where people walk and kids play? Cigarette butts are the single largest item of litter on the planet and one of the most deadly. This is a no-brainer.