If you were asked to close your eyes and picture the most commonly littered plastic on Earth, what would you see? Those six-pack rings that seabirds and turtles are always getting caught in? Or maybe public enemy number one: the disposable plastic straw?
The answer, in fact, is cigarette butts. An estimated 4.5 trillion butts are discarded into the environment every year. Often our brains can skip over a large number like that, so let’s pause for a second to establish the magnitude of scale – it’s about 580 cigarette butts per human being on the planet. On a yearly basis! And they’ve consistently been the most littered item since the 1980s. Put simply, it’s a buttload of butts.
By now the myriad harm that smoking does to our health is no secret, but it seems society is only beginning
