The merchant is collecting cigarette butts in sand-filled buckets this year at the popular holiday market so that they can be recycled into plastic lumber, shipping pallets, lawn furniture and ash trays.“The idea of plastic lumber really resonates with me because I’m a woodworker,” he said. “Instead of covering the beach with cigarette butts, we can build the boardwalk with plastic lumber made out of cigarette butts. How cool is that?”

Kubiak has placed four buckets in the outdoor smoking areas of Christkindlmarkt with a sign that says, “Make your butt useful.” Smokers have responded and the buckets were brimming with butts last week.

Kubiak will send the butts he collects to TerraCycle, a Trenton, N.J., company that specializes in finding ways to recycle items that previously were only sent to landfills. It launched the cigarette recycling initiative in the United States last month, company spokeswoman Lauren Taylor said.

“We worked for more than a year to find a solution for recycling cigarette butts because they are the world’s most littered item and account for 38 percent of all U.S. roadway waste,” Taylor said. “We’ve already collected just shy of 200,000 in the U.S. alone in less than a month. The alternative to recycling cigarette butts is what happens to them now. They go to landfills, get littered along roadways, in parks, public spaces, shopping malls, sidewalks, waterways, etc. They are the No. 1 item recovered during the annual Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup Day.”