Actually, I wasn’t trying to be like Jean, although in many ways she could be a great role model. I was doing a bit of investigative reporting from the ground up.

In recent weeks, I’ve noticed what seems to be a quickly increasing amount of litter on Tonganoxie’s downtown sidewalks. And of that litter the most prevalent are cigarette butts.

I swept the sidewalk because I wondered how much effort it would take to remove the cigarette butts.

Not much.

Our office broom handled the job admirably well, although it took some dozen or so sweeps in the crevices to dig out the deepest-buried butts.

Within 10 minutes about 50 cigarette butts, along with several candy wrappers and barbecue-sauce packets from a fast-food restaurant had been swept into a dustpan and tossed in a dumpster.

Even then my work was still undone more cigarette butts lingered at the base of the sidewalk’s tree.

A Web site, cigarettelitter.org, states that an estimated several trillion cigarette butts are littered worldwide every year and claims the butts are the most commonly littered item in America.

What’s particularly sad about this is that the filters in cigarettes are made of cellulose acetate fibers, a form of plastic.

According to the Philip Morris Web site, “It can take several years for an improperly discarded cigarette butt to degrade significantly.”

But some environmental Web sites claim that time period could be much, much longer as in a decade or more.

What that means is that when the current Tonganoxie kindergarten class is old enough to go off to college, parts of the same cigarette butts we see today may still be littering Tonganoxie sidewalks. And in the meantime it’s likely numerous more butts will have been tossed in that direction.

We don’t seem to get it, do we. The cigarette butts may appear to be small and innocuous. It’s convenient to drop them on the ground and stomp out the fire. But the fact is cigarette butts don’t just go away.

What’s the solution? The Philip Morris company suggests using ash-trash receptacles in convenient public places. Hmmm, that might help. So, is the great manufacturer of tobacco products going to shell out so cities across America can obtain these ash-trash cans free of charge? Doubtful.

What about asking the city to periodically clean the sidewalks? It’s likely they’d take it on. But because the city uses tax dollars, that means everyone would be paying to pick up debris left by a few.

Business employees could take on the task and sweep the walks themselves, which might be the most likely solution.

Or if worst comes to worst (or more specifically, if best comes to best), the unthinkable might happen and smokers could stub out their cigarettes, pick them up and take them with them.