Discarded cigarette butts on campus annoys students

MARQUETTE — According to NMU students the campus smoking ban has created a cigarette butt problem on areas that surround the school.

As students get settled in for this school year, they are also getting readjusted to the university’s No Smoking Policy.

“There are the NMU sidewalks that you can’t smoke on and then there are the city sidewalks that go around campus that you are allowed to smoke on. You are also allowed to smoke in a car if all the windows are up but that seems pretty hazardous,” says student Ryan Libienski.

Student, Ethan Ray says “It was nice being able to smoke. You can walk through campus, throw your cigarette butt away in one of the dispensers. Now they have taken all of those off campus, we are forced to either carry them in or put them on the ground and putting them on the ground looks terrible.”

“I don’t care for the smoking ban because a lot of what happens is that a lot of cigarette butts are laying all over the ground and sometimes we will find ourselves cleaning them up to find a nice clean spot to lay our blanket down,” ontinued Labienski.

In an effort to try and keep the campus free of cigarette butts, some students put up a self made collector.

Labienski says, “A couple of people put things out here, like a Gatorade bottle tied to one of the poles and they removed them.”

Ray adds “that it was Public Safety.”

“Really? Public Safety took them down, wow, that seems counter productive. Just look around it’s pretty messy, concludes Labienski.

Last year was the first year of NMU’s smoking ban.