Close your eyes and try to picture what 11.6 million disposable lighters would look like, if all piled together on one airport runway. That’s the picture of just one aspect of the tremendous waste caused by the paranoid screening of Homeland Security.
At around one dollar a piece, the 11.6 million lighters that have been confiscated by workers for the Department of Homeland Security at the nation’s airports represent 11.6 million dollars of waste.
However, the waste is worse than that, given the environmental cost of taking 11.6 million lighters, made of plastic and metal, filled with fuel, and just throwing them away.
What’s it for? Has anyone ever successfully brought down an airplane with just a cigarette lighter? Even the infamous shoe bomber wasn’t actually able to set off his bomb, and he didn’t try to use a cigarette lighter. He used matches.
There is no specific, credible threat of any terrorist attack using a cigarette to blow up an airplane. There never has been. Yet, every day, people are tossing lighters into the garbage, just in case there might be someone, somewhere, who has a secret plan to kill with a cigarette lighter.
With every cigarette lighter that is thrown away by Homeland Security, the USA becomes a little bit poorer, and a little bit more polluted.
(Source: Review Stream, April 25, 2007; USA Today, November 26, 2007)
