Cigarette butts are the world’s most littered item with nearly 4.5 trillion being tossed each year and last year in the U.S., it is estimated 1.69 billion pounds of butts ended up as toxic waste. Since 2012, when TerraCycle launched its first cigarette recycling program, it has worked with municipalities across the U.S. and abroad to collect hundreds of millions of butts around the world. In 2017, in the U.S. alone, TerraCycle collected tens of millions of cigarette butts from over 50 cities and 6 months into 2018, is poised to exceed those numbers.