Many municipalities, my own included as I came to discover, have policies which state that "commercial" trash, however generated, MUST be "PRIVATELY" contracted to be hauled away.

In other words, an independent trash hauling company with their own bins should have been contracted for each tobacco company representative.

Not only is this NOT done by the tobacco companies, we are told to remove the shipping labels and/or blot out the tobacco company name from the shipping cartons and to leave them out for municipal pick-up, effectively defrauding each municipality on a weekly or bi-monthly basis of what it would cost to have the trash removed by a private hauler, not to mention the added cost to the towns across the country, of the tonnage involved on an annual basis.

If you take an average private hauler pick-up charge of, say, $60.00 and apply that to even just ONE pick-up a month, and average out 3,000 tobacco company representatives going back just 30 years, throw out a high and a low and you are talking about the loss of municipal resources to the tune of  $64,800,000.00.

Two pick-ups per month...$129,600,000.00 in lost municipal resources.

As a smoking or non-smoking taxpayer in any town where a tobacco company representive lives and is forced by their employer to defraud their town in this fashion, I might be angry enough to insist that my town sue the tobacco companies for the recovery of lost resources.

This would address my town's street department effectively being made a "private" hauler for the major tobacco companies at no cost to them but at a loss of my tax dollars as is clearly illustrated in just this one example alone.