Tom Szaky collects the most disgusting things. Yucky yogurt containers. Sticky candy wrappers. Old flip-flops. Now, he and his Trenton, N.J., company, TerraCycle, are onto a new one: cigarette butts, the most common litter items on the planet. So bring ‘em on. Let neither stinkiness nor sogginess nor other manner of nastiness be a barrier. Once in hand, the company will “sanitize” and sort the butts, sending the paper and tobacco to a specialty tobacco composter. The filters will be melted and re-formed into pellets, eventually to end up as two different but butt-worthy items — ashtrays and park benches. For every 1,000 butts sent in by a TerraCycle member (find out more atwww.terracycle.com), a dollar will go to the national anti-littering nonprofit, Keep America Beautiful. Szaky said the new butt program “will help to promote our belief that everything can and should be recycled.” It’s part of his plan to “eliminate the idea of waste.” Targeting butts should be easy. They’re everywhere. A 2009 Keep America Beautiful study found that 65 percent of cigarette butts wind up as litter. In a quarter-century of beach cleanups, volunteers for the Ocean Conservancy have picked up more than 52 million butts — the most pervasive item they find. Many beaches now limit smoking to designated areas. Campuses fed up with spending thousands of dollars picking up the things have considered bans. Still the butts come. They are more than unsightly. Peer-reviewed studies have detailed how metals leach from smoked cigarettes. And how chemicals in the butts are harmful to fish, which is relevant because many butts wind up in waterways. Even when butts are picked up — or not littered to begin with — they add to the waste stream piling up in our landfills. Keep America Beautiful has actually studied butt locales. Most (85 percent) wind up on the open ground, followed by bushes or shrubbery, then around — not in — trash receptacles. The final 15 percent get stubbed out in planters.