Recycling Butts

Article off the USA Today: Efforts to recycle cigarette butts light up.

Why did I read the above article? Twitter feed made it look interesting, but nothing can be said to that fact aside from perhaps a HUGE cigarette butt pictured and numbers about costs of litter cleanup as compared to taxes collected.

How do you figure that it costs NYC $250,000 to clean up butts?  Evidently, no one gets paid to clean up sewers or pick up litter aside from cigarette butts. In 2009, $96,438,000 in taxes was collected on the 64 million packs of cigarettes legally sold in NYC.