It is said that cigarette butts carelessly discarded outdoors are an unsightly nuisance. However, our knowledge of what factors affect the degradation process and how long it takes for the butts to disappear is still quite limited. To elucidate these points, we examined how cigarette butts degrade under natural conditions at five sites with different climates in Japan. We observed the appearance of the cigarette butts and weighed them as they aged to provide a quantitative indicator of degradation. As a result, we found that different filter structures and materials affected the degradation process and how fast tipping and plug wrapping papers disintegrated. We also found that in addition to climatic conditions, soil characteristics may also affect the degradation process. Furthermore, we noted that biodegradation probably plays an important role even at the early stages of degradation. In natural settings, unavoidable variations in weather made it difficult to compare experiments which started in different seasons even if they were conducted in the same sites. They are also inherently inefficient since it takes several months for tipping and plug wrapping papers to disintegrate. Therefore, we supplemented the experiments in natural settings with controlled tests based on a weatherometer to accelerate the experiments and facilitate comparisons among them. We will report on our attempts to apply some of these methods to filter tips, focusing mainly on methods generally used to measure the weathering resistance of plastics and automotive parts.