Editor, Gazette-Journal:

When I come home in the morning, I usually smell like beer and cigarettes. I pick up litter for about an hour on my early morning dog walk in Mathews, and I end up with a couple of bags full. I’m focused on cigarette butts, since I learned in May that a single butt contaminates two gallons of water. That did it for me. Mathews has bad enough water as it is.

In four months I’ve picked up 6,268 butts. I don’t pick up every butt that I can, however—we’d miss the fun of our walk—but I make an extra effort when there’s a festival or bike tour. You want to spruce up for company. I figure there must be at least 500 butts discarded in the court house every day, and hundreds more in the rest of the county. Some are cleaned up by business owners, but many go down the storm drains into our waterways, which can’t be good for what lives there.

I’ve had some surprises. I am most shocked by how many butts are on th...