Butt, recycle?

I have been searching off and on over the last few years for anyone who is recycling or trying to recycle cigarette butts. with over 1 trillion of this little environmental pests put into the environment each year, there should be a strong economic motive to collect and recycle them. The only person I have found who has a process for doing anything with cigarette butts is Blake Burich, who's patent was approved in July 2009. His process uses ground up butts and several chemicals to render the material inert before "moulding it into useful products" His patient application states that no chemicals leach out of the materials when exposed to water. As a side note, 100 discarded cigarette butts contain enough nicotine to kill an adult human.

Of course collection of the butts for recycling is a problem in and of itself. Most smokers seem to have a hard time getting the butts into a receptacles within 10 feet of where they are standing, let alone holding on to them until they come upon one. Maybe, if someone where to develop a reason for collecting the butts, they could create a game out of the receptacles to encourage smokers to at least get their flicks closer to the bin. Who knows, maybe even Vegas would pick up on it!