Is Resistance Futile? Cigarette Butts Still Dominate Coastal Litter

Oct 17, 2018 at 3:00pm

Water Deeply, by Alastair Bland

For the environmental advocacy group Surfrider, a plan to curb the littering of cigarette butts began with energetic optimism. It was 1992, and at the time, cigarette filters were the single most frequently occurring item found in most beach cleanups – a statistic the organization hoped to erase.

However, the Hold On To Your Butt campaign has dragged on and on. Even as the 23rd annual California Coast Cleanup Day on September 15, 2018, calculates its successes – in terms of tons of trash removed from the state’s shores – on the butt end it continues as a humbling exercise in futility.

“Cigarette butts are still the number one item that we find,” says Shelly Ericksen, the director of the San Francisco chapter of Surfrider’s campaign. “It’s pretty clear we haven’t made a recognizable dent in the numbers.”

In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, smokers are estimated to litter 3 billion used filters every year, and no amount of research, campaigning, legislation and education can stifle this waste stream. There is hardly a city block or a beach, anywhere, that isn’t strewn with cigarette butts. Public roadways are lined with billions. Hikers find them on trails. Birds use them to build nests. Animals eat them.

Mobilized by water, wind and gravity, many or most eventually wind up in streams and storm drains and, eventually, the ocean, where it’s probable they are having a variety of negative impacts that scientists are trying to understand. Laboratory research has shown that cigarette butts – generally made of a type of plastic called cellulose acetate and laced with chemicals – are acutely toxic. A study published in 2011 in the journal Tobacco Control showed that a single butt in a liter of water can lethally poison a fish.

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