Dog owner shares upsetting discovery at local park: 'I just wanted to play ball'

By now, everyone knows that smoking cigarettes is a bad habit. But a bad habit becomes even worse when smokers carelessly toss their cigarette butts out into nature. 

One disturbing example surfaced when a dog owner posted to r/DeTrashed about the abundance of cigarette butts at a local park. 

"I just wanted to play ball with my dog, but cigarette butts kept getting stuck to her nose," the OP wrote. 

The dog owner shared a photo of a littered bottle filled with cigarette butts they collected from under a bench in the park. They planned to return with gloves and a trash bag to clean up more. 

With the park day ruined, the OP shared: "I just don't understand why people throw their cigarette butts everywhere. Even if you ignore the environmental impact, if you like hanging out in a place, why dirty it up?"

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. 

Cigarette butts are the world's most abundant source of plastic pollution and take 10 years to break down — and never biodegrade. Researchers have estimated that the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts exceeds $1 billion annually. 

This litter leaves arsenic and other toxic chemicals behind to pollute waterways and inhibit plant growth. It also makes parks unusable for people and pets while spoiling natural public areas.

Fortunately, many communities and companies are taking local action to eliminate cigarette butt litter. 

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Spain's government is making tobacco companies pay for cigarette butt cleanup and educate the public about how cigarette butts harm people's health and the planet. In Sweden, a startup company called Corvid Cleaning is enlisting the help of crows to pick up cigarette butts and dispose of them in a machine.

If you must smoke, the responsible way to dispose of cigarette butts is to extinguish them and place them into a trash can. 

Reddit users were disgusted by the cigarette butt trash that the OP and their pet encountered, voicing their shared frustrations in the comments. 

"Thank you for picking that trash up," one Redditor wrote. "Now, if we could get people to stop throwing more trash on the ground." 

The OP replied: "In another park area, people hung up juice bottles with big openings and letters asking people to throw their cigarette butts in there on the benches. It actually helped, and the park is much cleaner now. I'm thinking of doing something similar here."

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