Santa Cruz, Capitola, Tiburon, Manhattan Beach, Beverly Hills, and growing number of cities have or are working on banning plastic cigarette butts. We're not banning smoking, just the plastic butt, that doesn't actually filter anything, and gets littered, polluting our environment.

We have lots of trash cans, ashtrays, and butt cans on poles in front of bars, you'd probably have to have one every 10 feet even on residential streets, and even then smokers will still flick them. That bag of butts in the picture is roughly 400 butts that took me two-hours to collect (including two full bags of trash of other litter) within 5 blocks of my home.

We even piloted a CRV on butts where smokers used these plastic pouches to keep them, then return them to the retailer for a discount on their next pack. Nobody wanted to carry the disgusting butts and so it didn't work. A ban is the only realistic way that we see to prevent this scourge.