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For the last five years, Gabby Masseran has loved working as a bartender in Denver, Colorado — even if it means the occasional sticky floor or messy table. Lately, that professional joy has been tested by a tiny piece of trash now found everywhere from underneath tables to empty drink glasses: used nicotine pouches.
“I just started noticing them the past year, people just spit them all over the ground, in the urinal, in anywhere they could possibly spit it except for the trash,” Masseran, 23, told NBC News. “It used to be gum under the tables, now it’s just Zyns.”
It’s a complaint Masseran said she hears from other bartenders as nicotine pouches like Zyn — small packets that deliver nicotine through the gums without smoke or vapor — have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the tobacco market.
The small disposable sachets of nicotine salt and other chemicals can now be found almost everywhere — and that’s part of the problem.
The pouches, sold by a variety of companies, come in different doses and flavors — and can last between 30 minutes and an hour and 45 minutes, depending on their strength. Despite the rise of other tobacco alternatives like vapes, sales of nicotine pouches, stored in circular, gum-like dispensers, soared 641% from 2019 to 2022, according to 2024 research cited in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
As they grow in popularity, the pouches are now rivaling the cigarette butt as the most visible and environmentally damaging remnant of smoking that even sanitation officials say is noticeable.
“We don’t necessarily track the specific type of each piece of litter, but I can tell you that nicotine pouches (like their predecessor, cigarette butts) represent a unique problem for us — everyone knows not to litter, but for some reason, people think these small items don’t count,” Joshua Goodman, deputy commissioner for public affairs at the New York City Department of Sanitation, told NBC News in an email.
“Obviously, they are litter just like a coffee cup or a bag of chips, and obviously they go in the corner litter basket or your trash at home,” he added.
Jonathan Alpert, a New York and Washington, D.C.–based psychotherapist and author of the forthcoming book “Therapy Nation,” explained that in many ways nicotine pouches are “becoming the cigarette butts of the smoke-free era” because users can enjoy the product multiple times a day in public spaces where smoking or vaping is discouraged.
“The litter problem is partly behavioral,” he added. “Cigarette smokers were already accustomed to flicking a butt away outside. With pouches, users often remove them quickly and discreetly, and the nearest place to discard them becomes a golf course, the underside of a bar table, or the sidewalk. It’s less visible than smoking but produces its own kind of mess.”
Online, bartenders, restaurant workers and patrons have expressed outrage over the pouches being left behind. Masseran, who took her complaints about the pouches to TikTok, told her followers that she even throws away the drink glasses she finds with used pouches in them, “even if she washes it 1,000 times.”
Some bars have taken to posting signs asking people to dispose of their pouches in the trash.
“It’s so disgusting and nasty,” Masseran said. “I’ve heard it from so many other bartenders … that they just find Zyns everywhere, especially underneath the tables.”
Zyn is the most popular brand of nicotine pouches, but the company now faces a wide variety of competition from many other companies offering their own version of the product. Some have begun pushing pouches containing caffeine or even just a flavor.
A spokesperson for PMI U.S., which markets Zyn in the United States, said the company encourages responsible use and disposal. The company website notes that used pouches should be stored in the dispenser’s top compartment before being disposed of in the trash. The empty cans, made from recyclable plastic, can also be recycled after rinsing.
“PMI U.S. is invested in marketing our products responsibly and providing legal-age nicotine consumers with better alternatives to smoking and other traditional tobacco products, and we encourage them to use and dispose of the product responsibly as well,” the spokesperson told NBC News via email.
City sanitation officials, however, say the issue extends beyond just the nicotine pouches.
Goodman, the deputy commissioner, said the New York Department of Sanitation has issued about 6,000 summonses so far this year for dirty sidewalks, though those violations cover all types of litter. He also pointed to broader shifts in nicotine waste: a recent waste characterization study found that New York City trash now includes about a million pounds of discarded vapes.
“People think it is harmless, but it damages the look and feel of our city streets,” Goodman said about nicotine pouches. “I would say this is growing relative to cigarette butts and gum, but that they are all problems.”
