It’s not 1975, but if it were this ashtray wouldn’t only be filled with filtered cigarettes. Where are the snuffed-out filterless Pall Malls and Camels? If this were Europe there might be hand-rolled butts, if people used ashtrays when outdoors. This forest of butts represents about 460 lost minutes of work from the people who left the office building for a smoke. This doesn’t account for the ashtray on the other side of the building that had about an equal amount of filter trees growing in the sand. Then there are those people who hang out by the fence line, under the covered parking, or who pace and toss off their smoldering remnant of a cigarette onto the ground.

So in an office building with about 100 employees distributed across a bit more than half a dozen companies, I’d estimate that these small firms collectively lose about 20 hours of productivity a day. For these employees, they will encounter higher health care premiums and more sick days as smokers are typically sicker longer. Over the course of the year, they lose 218 days where they were paying people to go smoke. Just those days will cost those company’s about $52,200 not including paid sick time and insurance which, according to some studies, suggests amounts to over $100,000. That is the true cost of planting these forests.