Litter is a major pet peeve of mine. It is a completely voluntary bad habit which is bad for the environment. So many times I have wanted to turn on my flashing lights and siren and pull over a vehicle which has just tossed their trash out their window. (If only my car was equipped with such items!)

The most annoying type of litter to me is the (usually lit) cigarette butt that flies out a vehicle window and lands in the road. Although they no longer have ashtrays on airplanes, it is my understanding that they are still standard issue on all new vehicles.

That is why I found this story so amusing:

No ifs, ands or butts about it, Jonathan Fish learned an expensive lesson today about the dangers of littering.

The 20-year-old San Francisco resident was rolling across the upper deck of the Bay Bridge at 10:40 a.m., smoking a cigarette. When he got to Harrison Street, he rolled down the window of his white 2004 Ford Expedition SUV and tossed out the butt.

Instead of bounding along the pavement, however, the still-lit cigarette blew back in and set the interior of his $30,000 SUV ablaze.

In California, it is a misdemeanor to throw a burning cigarette out the window and onto the road. The beautiful irony of this story is that even though the butt never hit the ground, it looks like the driver will be charged.

An estimated 395 billion cigarettes were smoked in 2004. If only one-half of one percent of them end up on the ground (i.e. each smoker litters 1 out of every 200 cigarettes they smoke), we are looking at close to 2 billion non-biodegradable filters. The filters take 10 years to break down, so multiply the yearly figure by 10 to see the extend of the litter (from this very conservative estimate).

It is a pretty serious problem, and more information is available here, here and here.