Cigarette Butts Everywhere

You see it every day whether driving in your car on the way to school or leaving the galleria entrance, people flicking cigarette butts. Now I understand smoking is a habit many people do but cant the butts be controlled somehow. Walking down the street you see cigarette butts everywhere especially near the curbs and gutters. Cigarette butts, snack wrappers and take-out food and beverage containers are the most commonly littered items. Why is this so common? Is it really that hard for people to put their cigarette butts in the ashtrays of their cars or the ashtrays businesses spend money on to put outside the entrance of a building? This litter problem has got to stop. Each discarded cigarette butt takes 12 years to break down (About.com/ Litter Trashes Everything). Now I asked my friend why he did that one day when I saw him toss a cigarette butt. He simply replied “what, its biodegradable”. This might just be it. Maybe people are not educated enough to notice it’s harmful. Just because a product is made out of paper and tobacco and cotton as a filter does not mean it is biodegradable. Meanwhile while that cigarette butt just sits there it is releasing toxic elements such as cadmium, lead and arsenic into soil and waterways. Maybe we could have commercials or signs or some sort of advertisement to tell these people it is not okay to discard their butts on the lawn. Now for the snack wrappers and take-out food and beverage containers this is just pure carelessness. These people are just too lazy to actually throw their trash away from their cars in a trash can like everyone else. Littering these sorts of things is just plain selfishness and carelessness and those people should be punished to the full extent of the law.