From July to December 2017, San Francisco kept 100,000 butts off the streets by making cigarette ashcans publicly available in the Richmond and Sunset districts. [...]

“Cigarette butts are a huge problem in San Francisco and every other city in the world,” Sunshine Swinford, of the Department of Environment, told me. “When a smoker stomps on a butt to extinguish it, they leave it behind not realizing that it is plastic and toxic and will last for years in the environment.”