Fuming over cigarette butt litter

It's one of those things so mundane and commonplace, most of us probably don't even notice when it happens, let alone get worked up over it.

I don't know why it bugged me so much when I saw it again the other day.

I was driving on the 10 Freeway and watching as the driver ahead of me and his passenger casually flicked cigarette ashes out their windows as they chatted. Then, as they finished their smokes, first one and then the other tossed their butts onto the road.

This town is a lot of things. One thing it's not is an ashtray. But this got me wondering: How many cigarette butts get littered every year, and what does that do to the environment?

And what can we do about it?

"For people who smoke, tossing a butt on the ground is part of the whole ritual," said Thomas Novotny, a professor of epidemiology at UC San Francisco who focuses on cigarette butts. "It's not considered litter."

In fact, cigarette butts are among the most common forms of litter nationwide. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Works estimates that local smokers drop 600,000 butts on the ground every month, or more than 7 million a year.

"By a mile, the No. 1 item that we find at beach cleanups is cigarette butts," said Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, a Southern California environmental advocacy group.

According to Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit group that compiles statistics from thousands of community cleanups nationwide, cigarette butts account for about a third of all litter in the United States.

In urban areas, the group says, cigarette butts represent as much as half of all litter on streets and sidewalks.

Put another way, the nearly 370 billion filtered cigarettes smoked in the U.S. each year result in about 135 million pounds of butts littering the landscape. Worldwide, the more than 5 trillion cigarettes consumed annually create more than 2 billion pounds of butts.

"It's a form of blight," said UCSF's Novotny.

Butts are also a long-term and potentially hazardous pollutant. Cigarette filters are made primarily of a plastic-like material called cellulose acetate. Contrary to what some smokers may believe, this material isn't biodegradable. Rather, cigarette filters gradually break down over as much as a dozen years into smaller particles that remain in the environment.

According to Novotny, the typical cigarette butt contains nicotine, arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, acetone and vinyl chloride.