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By Kathleen M. Register
Smokers discard billions of cigarette butts yearly, tossing many
directly into the environment. Cigarette butts accumulate outside of
buildings, on parking lots and streets where they can be transported
through storm drains to streams, rivers, and beaches.
Emergence of the issue
Photo courtesy of Clean Virginia Waterways
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Prior to 1954, most cigarettes were non-filtered. In the
mid-1950s, sales of filtered cigarettes increased dramatically as
the cause-effect relationship between smoking and cancer was
reported extensively in the press. Before these reports, in 1950,
sales of filtered cigarettes in the US were 1.5% of all cigarette
sales. Now, more than 97% of cigarettes sold in the U .S. have
filters.
The recent bans on indoor smoking have also appeared to cause a
shift in cigarette butt deposition. Circumstantial evidence
indicates that more cigarette butts are accumulating outside of
buildings due to the popularity of indoor smoking bans. In
Australia, cigarette butts account for 50% of all litter, a trend
that the executive director of Keep Australia Clean blames partly on
indoor no-smoking policies.
How many discarded cigarette butts are
there?
The 470 billion cigarettes smoked in the United States in 1998
translates to a total of 176,250,000 pounds of discarded butts in
one year in the United States alone.
There is one measure as to how many
cigarette butts are finding their way into streams, rivers, and
coastal environments. The International Coastal Cleanup Day,
organized annually by The Ocean Conservancy, involves more than
500,000 volunteers picking up debris from beaches, rivers, and
streams around the world. Volunteers complete Marine Debris Data
Cards indicating the quantity and type of litter they pick up.
Cigarette butts were the most common debris item collected during
the international cleanup, numbering 1,268,177 in 2004 (the last
year data are available). Cigarette butts have topped the list in
all International Coastal Cleanups since they were added to the Data
Cards as a separate item in 1990.
Because of the vast inflow of cigarette
butts into the environment, experiments were conducted to determine
if cigarette butts as litter present an environmental problem beyond
aesthetics and have a measurable toxic effect when they enter the
aquatic environment. Studies concluded that cigarette butts contain
chemicals that can kill some of the animals that occupy critical
positions in aquatic communities. The full report on this study can
be found on the Internet at:
http://www.longwood.edu/cleanva/ciglitterarticle.htm
About the Author:
Kathleen Register is the founder and executive director of
Clean Virginia Waterways, and coordinates the
International Coastal Cleanup in Virginia. She is an adjunct
faculty member in the Department of Natural Sciences at Longwood
University in Farmville, Virginia. Ms. Register has a master's
degree from George Mason University in Environmental Resources and
Policy, and is co-author of the U.S. EPA's
Estuary Monitoring: A Methods Manual and
Virginia's Water Resources: A Tool for Teachers. To contact the
author, please send an e-mail to
cleanva@longwood.edu or call 434-395-2602. |
