At Erasmus University Rotterdam, there appears to be a gap in the official rule about smoking on campus. This environmental pollution from littered butts is an indicator of both the environmental and health costs of smoking. Right behind the building where I work, I found thousands of cigarette butts two years after all universities in the Netherlands were supposed to have gone smokefree.

So what’s going on? Is this just a matter of poor enforcement? Or is this a matter of insufficient norm change? Our taxes on cigarettes too low? Are antitobacco countermarketing messages simply absent or not enough?

Why are smoking rates in the Netherlands still so high even after some recent bold policy innovations? Which branches of the government are still complacent and protecting the tobacco industry allowing tens of thousands of Dutch to die every year from smoking- related illnesses?

We all know that cigarettes serve no social function and people only smoke (as a way of self-medicating) because of slick marketing in our movies and other media by the industry. And obviously it seems as if the environmental consequences of smoking have also failed to reach young people on this salient point. Here countermarketing could be a successful tactic as has been used in other places like California, where the smoking incidence is less than 8%. Tax cigarettes additionally in order to denormalize them with slick countermarketing. Let people know about the environmental and health costs of cigarettes.

Also, ban the butt – filters provide absolutely no health benefits, but were part of the ‘filter fraud’ created in the 1950s to placate people’s worries that cigarettes were causing cancer. They are a cosmetic accoutrement, nothing else – and yet, because they are made of cellulose acetate, they don’t break down, but persist in our environments, hurting birds, fish, children and other animals who eat them.

If you’ve been keeping up with my work, I’m into upstream solutions. Here’s an example from The Ocean Cleanup which is a very necessary, but very downstream solution.

While I applaud such actions, why do these get so much airplay (and funding)? While getting rid of fossil fuel non-biodegradable plastics is not proportionally advanced as the priority it is?

The Interceptor Trashfence in Guatemala’s Rio Motagua Basin, home to what may be world’s most polluting river, did not stop this particular trash tsunami.

But this is just one of tens of thousands of such polluted waterways, and instead of putting trash fences across every river, let’s put a trash fence on our hands, on our eyes, our mouths, our noses, our grocery stores. Geofence that stuff, making it impossible to sell plastic, like Kenya did with plastic bags. It’s been working. Supply side solutions work. Anything else is just a pipedream.

End of line solutions are feel good, and inefficient. They trick us into believing band aid symptoms are enough, ignoring treatment of the root causes and sources of gross pollutants. The communities upstream, because they are not held accountable, exculpated and exonerated for their indulgences by lo-tek environmental cleaning, will continue the culture of ‘out of sight out of mind’ never really reducing the pollutant loads.

A different tactic would be to cease direct (drainage) connections to waterways, by decentralizing, distributing and applying source control storm water management approaches. By creating EPR – extended producer responsibility, this would propel manufacturers to create their own circular economies for materials and supply chains. When every piece of trash has a maker – and therefore owner, every manufacturer must take care of its trash, or pay steep fines, steep enough to put them out of business if they opt to cut corners.