In February, the San Francisco school board voted to let city middle schools give condoms to students. The controversial decision made headlines. Will access to condoms encourage kids to have sex? Or is The City simply helping students have sex safely? Similar questions loom as The City considers providing resources for another stigmatized activity: smoking cigarettes.

Increasingly, researchers are realizing that cigarettes are as much an environmental problem as they are a health issue. Walk along a beach or around a busy city and you step on a lot of cigarette butts, thrown carelessly to the ground. By one estimate, up to 6 trillion cigarette butts get flicked onto the ground and into the global environment every year. They’re one of the most common forms of the world’s litter, making up 25 to 50 percent of all trash collected from roads and streets.

Consider it a polling place and ashtray rolled into one. The Alliance for the Great Lakes is working with the Chicago Park District to bring "voting" boxes to Chicago beaches this summer in a pilot program designed to curb cigarette littering, said Jennifer Caddick, alliance engagement director. The custom-made rectangular boxes, which have been used in London and more recently in Boston since last month, will ask smokers a question that could be focused on the never-ending sports rivalry of Cubs vs. Sox or the food fight between deep dish pizza and Chicago-style hot dogs. Smokers would "vote" by putting their cigarette butts into a hole so they fall into one of two compartments.

Keep Bamberg County Beautiful, along with its volunteers, have collected nearly 2,000 pounds of litter from roadways since the first of the year. However, that’s just a small amount of what needs to be picked up, KBCB Director Mallory D. Biering says. KBCB will hold a countywide cleanup from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, March 12, in an effort to bring the community together to help get rid of unsightly litter, she said. Biering said KBCB and the Bamberg County Recycling Program also launched their newest recycling program on Feb. 29. The program, known on social media as the “We Want Your Butts,” focuses on not only recycling cigarette waste, but also preventing cigarette waste from becoming litter.

Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore has installed 15 recycling receptacles to encourage smokers to properly dispose of their used cigarettes in Harbor East as part of its Healthy Harbor Initiative. Cigarette litter collected will be sent to TerraCycle for recycling, eliminating cigarette litter from Baltimore’s streets, waterways and landfills. “Every year, millions of cigarette butts are tossed on the ground in Baltimore. When it rains they get washed into our storm drains, which flow directly into our streams and Harbor,” said Adam Lindquist, director of Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative.

Dive Brief: The city of Columbia MO's Downtown Community Improvement District has bought and installed 18 cigarette boxes downtown to collect filters and has ordered 32 more at $50 each from TerraCycle, a Trenton, NJ recycling company. The cigarette waste is shipped to TerraCycle's New Jersey facility, then moved off site for processing. The remaining paper and tobacco are composted. The plastic is melted and turned into pellets. And the filters are converted to industrial products like plastic lumber and railroad ties.

The Hastings Revitalization Association (HRA) will approach the municipality to see if it will provide some financial support to help the organization acquire mesh waste bins. The Association will also ask for advice on where they should be located and request that bylaw enforcement signs be posted nearby to remind visitors to use the receptacles.

Cigarette butts are one of the most common kinds of litter, found everywhere from land to waterways. The tobacco and paper in them will break down, so those can be composted. But the filters contain a plastic, and that can take years to decompose. Yet if the butts are carefully processed, the cellulose acetate can be used to make things such as park benches and pallets. Recycling companies like TerraCycle are also refining their processing methods to create higher-end plastic products.  

EAST PEORIA — The Thinkinators are thinking again. The FIRST LEGO League Robotics team — consisting of teammates from Bolin School, Central Junior High School and East Peoria Community High School — presented its five-minute skit to teachers, parents and classmates Dec. 9 at CJHS. First Lego League is a robotics program for 9 to 14 year olds that is “designed to get children excited about science and technology, and team them valuable employment and life skills.”   The Thinkinators decided to focus on the issue of smokers who throw their cigarette butts on the ground, causing excessive amounts of litter.   “The invention we created solves the problem of cigarette butt litter. We’re not saying we support smoking. We’re just trying to find a way to eliminate waste. I think we all can agree that a cigarette butt on the ground is not a pretty sight to see,” said team member Mariah Tippet.   The team’s skit revolved around three high school students, one of whom threw a cigarette butt on the ground. His friend questioned him about his action, and they soon learn about the repercussions and harmful environmental impacts of throwing the butts on the ground.   Some may not realize it is illegal to throw a cigarette butt on the ground in Illinois, and offenders can receive hefty fines for throwing butts out of cars. Yet the Thinkinators said 45 percent of all littered trash are cigarette butts.   The Thinkinators’ solution to cigarette butt litter is called the Aluminator, a cigarette pack with a built-in, aluminum, fire-resistant strip that smokers push to the side, creating an area inside the pack to store the butts inside. After the pack is full of butts, the box can be transformed into a postage-paid package that can be sealed and mailed to a company called TerraCycle, which transforms waste into products.

Battleford Town Council is looking at new ways to discourage littering after a presentation by a high school student about how litter harms wildlife. "Litter is much more than an eyesore. It presents a real threat to wildlife. Litter not only hurts animals, it can kill them," 16-year-old Natalya Shevchuk told councillors recently. "Some of us treat our world as a huge trash bin," the young advocate told town councillors. One of the most insidious forms of litter is the thousands of cigarette butts that can be found nearly everywhere, said the North Battleford Comprehensive High School International Baccalaureate student, and she wants to see a cigarette butt-recycling project set up in Battleford, her hometown. She recommended a program such as one offered by TerraCycle, an international upcycling and recycling company that repurposes difficult-to-recycle products. The company even pays for the cost of shipping cigarette waste to them for recycling, she said. Councillors expressed an interest and administration will be looking into the program as well as installing signs in public buildings.