What’s the most commonly found piece of litter on the side of Pennsylvania highways?

It’s not soda cans. It’s not scrap paper.

It’s cigarette butts, according to the Pennsylvania Litter Research Study. The study was compiled earlier this year.

The City of Easton is trying to do its part to reverse this trend. The Easton Ambassadors have collected more than half a million cigarette butts from recycling receptacles placed around the city starting in 2015.

“We’re just making it really convenient for smokers to throw out their cigarette butts. I don’t think they want to litter. It’s just that they have no place to put them,” said Sandra Zajacek, the operations manager for the Easton Ambassadors. The red-coated ambassador crews pick up litter, maintain planters, give directions to out-of-towners and do what they can to make the city hospitable.

The cigarette butt collection program started modestly with four receptacles. Now there are more than 20 across the Downtown.

Zajacek is thrilled to report the city received a grant for hundreds more cigarette recycling receptacles courtesy of Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful.

Her organization will slowly deploy the pole-mounted containers in the city’s Downtown and West Ward neighborhoods. Zajacek wants to collect as many butts as she can but doesn’t want to overwhelm her staff by having to empty hundreds of new boxes at the same time.

The new containers will replace stand-alone street-level containers put out in 2008. Those containers sometimes blow over. Sometimes people stuff trash into them. That’s not as big a problem with the small pole-mounted containers.

The trash study found 96 million butts along Pennsylvania roads in 2019.

And butts are the most commonly-found litter in the ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“All these cigarette butts go into the street when people flick them. Then it rains and all they go out into the Delaware and the Lehigh and the Bushill Creek,” Zajacek said. “That’s just really bad for the environment.”

The butts collected by the Easton Ambassdors go to TerraCycle, which converts them into shipping pallets and park benches.

Zajacek has long been an advocate for the environment. She admits she smoked as a teen but she mitigated the damage to herself by zealously advocating for the proper disposal of butts. She made a friend pull over her car after the friend carelessly flicked a butt out the window. When the friend picked up a littered butt, the trip resumed.

Zajacek said it’s rewarding “to have a real program and do something I already have a passion about.”