If you’ve been perusing any social media platform lately, you’ve surely come across the ‘Churot ko thutto’ movement. A brightly colored yellow tin box, almost a mailbox, but for cigarettes can be found in Basantapur for the sole purpose of collecting Cigarette butts that would otherwise be thrown on roads or the surrounding areas. Churot ko Thutto movement looks to tackle the severe degree of pollution that comes with the rampant, uncontrolled, harmful disposal of these cigarette butts.

As of a research conducted by Earthday.org, Cigarette butts are the most commonly polluted form of plastic, with these tiny toxins numbering to about 4.5 trillion in our environment with 6.5 trillion being sold every year. The scary part about these Cigarette butts isn’t in that they number in the trillions, but that their makeup of a very toxic plastic, detrimental to our environment. Taking 10 years to degrade, an individual cigarette butt contains trace-amount of toxins such as Arsenic, Lead and Nicotine that can gradually prove deadly to the ecosystem. Especially when these toxins through the cigarette butts find themselves seeping into our soil and water leading to severe degradation and pollution.