The photos with this blog show the rather disgusting sight that greeted me Sunday morning as I walked downtown on Kentucky Street in front of Infusions. The butt zone extended for three parking spaces.

Disgusting!

Here is a suggestion for a small thing someone can do to make the world around her or him a better place. This one is for smokers only. Please, when you finish your cigarette, put it out and put the butt in the trash. Please, don’t throw butts into the street anymore.

If cigarette smokers started properly disposing of their butts, there would be a lot less litter. How much less litter? “It’s estimated that trillions of filters, filled with toxic chemicals from tobacco smoke, make their way into our environment as discarded waste yearly.” (Source: Cigarette Litter and How it Affects Us)

It costs nothing to dispose of a cigarette butt properly. Disposing of a cigarette butt properly is easy to do and it improves the world around you. Why wouldn’t someone properly dispose of a cigarette butt?

This is an excellent example of a little thing we (all smokers) can do to improve the world around us.

This is also an excellent example of how we all have to pay for the price for what some Americans do. Cigarette butts damage the environment and second hand smoke kills thousands of us every month. Butt that’s a topic for another day.

Here is another quote from Cigarette Litter and How it Affects Us:

“The core of most cigarette filters — the part that looks like white cotton, is actually a form of plastic called cellulose acetate. By itself, cellulose acetate is very slow to degrade in our environment. Depending on the conditions of the area the cigarette butt is discarded in, it can take 18 months to 10 years for a cigarette filter to decompose. But that isn’t the worst of it. Used cigarette filters are full of toxins known as tar, and those chemicals leach into the ground and waterways, damaging living organisms that contact them. And, most filters are discarded with bits of tobacco still attached to them as well, further polluting our environment with nicotine.”

To learn more about the consequences of cigarette butts, visit http://quitsmoking.about.com/od/cigaretteingredients/a/ciglitter.htm (Cigarette Litter and How it Affects Us)

Please, if you smoke cigarettes, make a promise to never again throw a butt away.

Please, if you smoke cigarettes, try and convince as many of your fellow smokers as you can to never throw a butt away again.

And if you don’t smoke, do whatever you can to keep butts from littering our beaches, streets, rivers, parks…