No more cigarette butts on the ground: let's keep our cities clean by following Tel Aviv's example.

BUTTs ON THE GROUND –

I read a desperate letter to Il Messaggero from a woman who wrote: “I live on a beautiful street, with trees and green spaces. But it's destroyed by a carpet of cigarette butts that my neighbors throw on the ground every day. What a torment and what a waste….” We are increasingly invaded by cigarette butts . And many public administrators protest and ask citizens for help: we can't collect them and so the city will never be clean, they say. They are everywhere: in the streets, in the squares, along the sidewalks, in the gardens. And everywhere we are inundated with cigarette butts, those damned butts that we throw on the ground without ever caring about the damage done. A sign of our citizens' incivility? Certainly. Is it the impotence of municipal administrations in the face of chaos and filth? True. Yet it would take very little, very little, to make significant progress.

ALSO READ: Stability Law: Fines of up to €150 for littering cigarette butts

TEL AVIV'S SOLUTION TO STREET CIGARETTE BUTTERS –

One should take inspiration from a stroll in Tel Aviv , along the marvelous waterfront that connects the new city with ancient Jaffa, and your heart beats as you remember Naples. It's a poignant emotion, filled with the colors of the sunset, just like a stroll along the Neapolitan waterfront, and it's also a lesson in street furniture. Simple, elegant, effective. Easy to import, in short. In Tel Aviv, in fact, there's no Taliban crusade against smokers , like in New York and many American cities: we are tolerated with our cigarettes, and with our habit of smoking outdoors. As long as we don't waste, and above all, we don't damage the city by throwing cigarette butts on the ground.

The Tel Aviv city administration, however, has stepped up to the plate for us heavy smokers, installing a series of elegant ashtrays (or ashtrays) designed by masters of Israeli design along the waterfront promenade, among the benches and bike paths. The project wasn't free (it's included in the municipal budget under "Street Furniture"), but it also attracted generous contributions from private sponsors.

CIGARETTE BUTTS: DISPOSAL –

In Italy , unfortunately, we continue, almost everywhere, to throw cigarette butts in the street, on sidewalks, in front of bar tables. I confess, I did it too, until a few years ago when my daughter, then thirteen, said to me: "Dad, what are you doing? Are you crazy?" The lesson served me well, and now every time I have to put out a cigarette butt, I look for the ashtray. And I almost never find one . Why? It would take very little, very little, to minimally equip our cities and public spaces with a few unobtrusive, elegantly designed ashtrays (we are masters in this field in Italy).

Some municipal administrations have done so: in Verona , for example, you frequently find ashtrays on the street, which don't cause any disturbance, and the bill was paid by a Northeastern company that manufactures fireplaces, Camini Wierer , thus providing useful sponsorship for the citizens of Veneto and for corporate marketing. At the Milan Triennale, I saw the works of the winners of a design competition, which presented ashtrays that look like small works of art.

Italy, as usual, is making slow and patchy moves across the country, including in the area of ​​street furniture and, in this case, combating cigarette butt waste . What more can we do? Simple: broaden our network of initiatives and push mayors and a few generous and enlightened entrepreneurs everywhere to take action to install ashtrays, as in Tel Aviv . Always remembering that a cigarette butt has enormous disposal costs, especially for municipalities that fail to provide street furniture (a huge waste), and a cigarette butt discarded in the street or on the sidewalk can remain polluting our Italian beauty spots for up to ten years.

from Il Mattino

TO LEARN MORE: A Sicilian pensioner's wonderful initiative to rid the beach of cigarette butts.