The Green Side: No ifs, ands, or butts

Can you guess the most common type of trash? It's not extremely surprising. Cigarette butts are the culprit.

According to the American Littoral Society, cigarettes are the most common type of litter on earth. A study in the Journal of Tobacco Control reports smokers litter more than 4.5 trillion of them each year. Smoking's environmental impact (we won't go into the health woes here) is already atrocious: It emits 5.5 billion pounds of CO2 and more than 11 billion pounds of methane annually. Discarded butts add insult to injury, leaching hundreds of toxic chemicals (arsenic, lead, and benzene among them) into the water, air, and ground, killing birds, fish, and healthy microorganisms.

And they aren't biodegradable. Just in case you need any other reasons to quit smoking.