It's the old "dilution is the solution to pollution" mantra. The world seems so huge, and a cigarette butt so small. It's obviously a fallacy. Because there are

It's the old "dilution is the solution to pollution" mantra. The world seems so huge, and a cigarette butt so small. It's obviously a fallacy. Because there are just so damn many people. What persists are the mouthpiece (plastic) and filter (synthetic fiber). Tobacco degrades very quickly, and paper within a year or so. So when I smoked, I never left butts behind. For one thing, I was typically short of money, so I kept the tobacco in a small bag. I mainly smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and typically balled up the paper, and put it in a pocket. Sometimes I just dropped the paper, I admit. And sometimes I even saved it, for reuse. But I've also made the argument that people are quite comfortable polluting in ~invisible ways. For example, let's say that there's a road full of motor vehicles. And someone flicks out a butt. Fellow drivers will typically grumble, or yell at them. But they don't realize that they're all polluting far more, through emissions of SO2, NOx, CO2, hydrocarbons, particulates, and so on.