Chew On This

I believe it was my father who first set the notion in my head that if you swallowed a piece of gum, it would stay in your stomach for twenty-five years. This piece of wisdom dovetailed nicely with his general and overriding distaste for gum-chewing. Though my father had a much more profound sense of the time it would take to digest a stick of Juicy Fruit, there are plenty of other parents who would tell you it takes at least seven years for your body to be rid of it. Twenty-five or seven, the truth is that it is indigestible and it will move through your body in much the same way that corn makes the same trip.
This was the thought I had as I listened to the announcement this morning of Coastal Cleanup Day. This Saturday, volunteers from around the Bay Area will descend on area beaches to put litter in its place. A cigarette butt would decompose quicker than that lump of gum. It takes somewhere between two and twenty-five years for them to return to the earth. Aluminum cans, by contrast, take two to five hundred years, and everybody's favorite plastic six-pack rings can take up to four hundred and fifty years to become just a memory. That's why we need to pick this stuff up and put it where it belongs. Happily, the recycling process helps in some of those tough cases. It seems a wonder that there are any unattended aluminum cans left anywhere, given the number of industrious types I see weekly rummaging through our recycling bin, but maybe there are still certain locales and destinations off their beaten path.
But cigarette butts? What can you do with those? There are over one hundred seventy-six million pounds of discarded cigarette butts in the United States each year. What sort of craft project can you envision? I'm back to thinking about that undigested wad of gum and believing that is a much more palatable discussion. Or maybe we should ask smokers to chew up their own litter. That way we know exactly where it would be, at least for a few hours, if not twenty-five years.