SFEI develops and adapts method for tobacco product waste monitoring as a mobile app for easy use. 

Tobacco product waste—particularly cigarette butts, wrappers, filters, and electronic cigarette parts—are among the most common forms of environmental litter. High-quality data on tobacco product waste is essential for answering questions such as:

• How much tobacco product waste is in a given neighborhood, school, or city?
• How do levels compare across regions or over time?
• Are particular products, types, or brands contributing disproportionately to waste?
• Are cleanup efforts or policy interventions working effectively?

To get reliable, credible answers to these questions, the California Tobacco Prevention Program with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) needed a scientific monitoring method.

SFEI helped to develop such a method several years ago. And thanks to a continuing engagement with CDPH, the partnership has now yielded a mobile application that can collect detailed assessments.

This app helps CDPH grantees across the state of California—like non-profits, researchers, and municipal tobacco-use prevention programs—to monitor their local areas of interest. Users can choose the best level of detail for their assessment while ensuring that required fields, area measurements, and data structures remain consistent.

After collecting data, CDPH staffers and mobile app users can gain more insights with the associated data dashboard. The Tobacco Product Waste Data Dashboard can compare data across vast areas to identify tobacco product waste hotspots, areas of greatest improvement, and significant trends over time and drivers of those trends.