Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straw-ban-cigarette-butts-are-single-greatest-source-ocean-n903661

by SmkyMt • 8 years ago

121 100 8 years ago

ghouse• 8 years ago

My own cognitive bias about smokers littering is why I vote in favor of any cigarette tax. Yes, I realize that not all smokers think the street or sidewalk is an appropriate place for their used cigarette. But the people I see smoking do this, so I (inaccurately) assume they all do (without consequence).

sieabahlpark• 8 years ago

You wouldn't be wrong. My favorite are the smokers who put out their cigarette on a wooden fence and throw it into the desert brush.

Hasn't caught fire yet somehow

icebraining• 8 years ago

Not that surprising. Lumber doesn't catch fire that easily (hence fire starters).

rhacker• 8 years ago

In the summer time in various forest towns in California, some of which have had major fires recently... I see probably 20 grass fires a year. All of them start next to the road.

I actually think the perpetrators are not that we have 1000 smokers, there are probably just a few REALLY bad people that don't care. They are also the kind of people that if you started to put up signs about smoking and fires, they would start throwing lit matches out the window.

rrauenza4• 8 years ago

It seems no one uses their car ashtray anymore, either -- probably because it makes the car stink.

So they hold the cig outside their window, tap the ashes into the street, and often flick the butt into the road. I sometimes wonder how many lit cigs get dropped by accident into the road.

ams6110• 8 years ago

What cars still have ashtrays? I haven't seen one since 1990s models. I have several cars 2002 - 2004 and none of them have an ashtray, or a lighter.

techdmn• 8 years ago

I especially like this when I'm riding a motorcycle behind them. Nothing like people casually tossing flaming projectiles at you while you're on your way to work.

berberous• 8 years ago

Every smoker I have ever known throws their used butts in the street, so I don't think it's inaccurate.

posterboy3• 8 years ago

I just thought to myself, I don't do this, but actually, sometimes I do without even thinking about it.

Like, it should be decomposable, if it's cell tissue.

merpnderp2• 8 years ago

We have a smokers pole outside for butts. It is surrounded by butts and is apparently only emptied when it catches fire and enters "self cleaning mode" which I'm sure creates a nice miasma of VOC from the burning plastics.

I'm very wary of voting for any sort of social nannying laws that try to keep people from making bad choices, but I make a strong exception for smokers, who seem to be nearly unanimous in treating the world like they treat their lungs.

simonebrunozzi• 8 years ago

Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.

Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.

wbrasky• 8 years ago

That would make sense if you could meaningfully recycle filters, like you can glass bottles. This would end up being a false economy subsidy more than likely. No thanks.

collyw• 8 years ago

It will still go some way toward them ending up in the sea.

gascan3• 8 years ago

Why do you need to recycle them? A deposit requires no subsidy- the purchaser pays an extra $0.20 per cig, and recoups that when they return the butts. The accomplished function is the recovery of the butts.

Caveat, all the old butts pre-deposit could probably still get returned for $0.20, which would require some money from somewhere.

firic• 8 years ago

The idea is to make a pack cost 0.2*num_of_cigs_in_pack more dollars and then when someone returns butts, they can receive that money back. It will not be a subsidy and even if the butts were thrown in the trash afterwards, it would at least lower litter.

zaptheimpaler• 8 years ago

I like the idea.. it is tricky to get right though. Cigarette butts smell a lot, so if smokers started carrying around 20 butts in their pack at work/home, non-smokers would not like it. Its hard to imagine modifying a pack cheaply enough to contain the smell.

phyzome2• 8 years ago

Would it smell worse than the smell the smoker already carries? I suppose it might, since some smokers are pretty careful not to get the smoke on their clothing. (You can still smell their lungs for like 5-10 minutes afterwards, though.)

(And... sorry to any smokers reading this. Not trying to shame you, but I want to be realistic about whether this would work or not.)

rjsw• 8 years ago

You can get pocket ashtrays for use when hiking or skiing. I don't smoke so don't know whether they smell or not.

The tax could help reduce the number of butts that are thrown away in wilderness areas too.

netsharc• 8 years ago

In Europe where people get their deposit back for bottles, the homeless (interestingly, not just them, a study in Germany said it also gave bored pensioners something to do) look in trash cans to find bottles to return. I remember reading an experiment where a city (I think in Canada) implemented a trial program to give people 6 cents per cigarette butt: they spent the money marked for the returns quicker than expected because the homeless people collected butts diligently.

It's a bit of a crazy world to make the homeless clean up pollution other people make, but even without this program there are (and will) still be homeless people...

downrightmike• 8 years ago

If only we could make air tight containers of some sort.

natch2• 8 years ago

I agree, but have to point out that non-smokers not liking disgusting smells has never stopped smokers before.

jdietrich• 8 years ago

Pocket ashtrays are a normal part of smoking etiquette in Japan.

butt_inski2• 8 years ago

Hmmm, cigarette packs that are modified to allow for easy storage? That sounds gross enough to disincentivize any shot at people redeeming deposit funds.

Even more gross: homeless people scrambling for cigarette butts as a side grift. Which, you know, is sure to happen. More profitable than beer and soda cans, and smaller too?

The thing with cans and bottles is that they aren’t absorbant in the same way that cigarette stubs are. People put their mouth on both, but it’s way easier to avoid saliva touching a can or bottle, than a lipstick stained cigarette.

So those packs would have to be water tight, slotted for 20 stubs, and translucent so no one has to open up or guess at how many stubs are inside, for redemption.

Also, redeeming by weight would require standardized tare weights, and approximates for paper/fiberglass mix by volume. Redeeming a ten pound garbage bag, at 20 cents a butt? What’s that worth? Enough to start a street fight?

It could work. But let’s not give tuberculosis another reason to spread.

thx11389793• 8 years ago

it's all fun and games until someone figures out they can make cigarette butts and turn them in for money

koolba• 8 years ago

Wouldn’t be the first time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

gruez3• 8 years ago

considering people aren't making bottles/cans to game beverage container deposit programs, I don't think it's going to be that big of an issue.

throwanem2• 8 years ago

What does the seller do with it, then? There has to be some sort of sequestration program, possibly involving landfills - but a mass of cigarette butts is likely to produce runoff that's toxic to plants and insects, at the very least, if not to everything in its path. So, if you have a multiple-stream recycling program, you probably need to add a stream to that specifically for butts; if you have a single-stream program, I hope your sorters are getting hazard pay already, and if they aren't then they sure should be now. And you still have the sequestration problem from here - all you've accomplished is to make it minimally possible to implement that. And all of this costs, and everything downstream of it will cost, too.

Cheaper and simpler just to ban cigarettes entirely. And I realize that's neither simple nor cheap! But it's not the worst idea I've ever heard, either. Even back when I smoked every day, I wasn't entirely against it; now that I smoke only when drunk, I favor it considerably more. Yeah, it sucks to go cold turkey, but nicotine isn't like ethanol; quitting cold turkey makes you miserable for a while, but it's not going to kill anyone.

lovich• 8 years ago

A lot of recycling in the US is done with slave labor that already violates workplace safety, so I'm not sure they'd care about adding cigarette butts to single stream programs[1]

[1]http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/doj-iog-unicor-violati...

blang• 8 years ago

I think one of the problems with this idea (which I do find really interesting) is that this type of legislation encourages people the smoke more responsibly rather than encourage people not to smoke, which is what most legislation aims to do in regards to cigarettes. Most likely the thing that would be passed would be a $0.20 tax per butt to pay for clean up and incentivize people to stop smoking.

Nadya• 8 years ago

Or try and train birds [0]. Bird feed is cheap.

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/startups/news/a2...

drewrv• 8 years ago

I think it would be even simpler to mandate cigarette filters are biodegradable, made from cotton or something.

simongr3dal• 8 years ago

That’s not really feasible considering that many filters are made partly from activated carbon in order to filtrate many of the harmful substances that are in cigarettes.

posterboy3• 8 years ago

Have you seen the prices people pay on this? They'd throw the money out of the window without second thoughts. They do with deposit cans already.

bassman9000• 8 years ago

Butts absolutely stink. No smoker is going yo store 10-20 of them.

I'd rather seem them made biodegradable.

SiempreViernes• 8 years ago

On the one hand, cigarettes give you a slow painful death and they are still not universally banned, so there is not much prior reason for hope.

On the other, banning filters seems like a simple enough solution to such a concrete and immediate problem as littering that it might be reasonable to believe an enforce can be implemented despite the track record.

Rotdhizon• 8 years ago

I read somewhere the other week that fishing gear was the biggest source of ocean trash. Which is it?

giarc• 8 years ago

Likely due to volume vs pieces.

By volume, I believe fishing nets are the largest polluter, but likely if you counted the pieces, cigarette butts might be higher.

butt_inski2• 8 years ago

So, which is worse? I think fishing nets by light years, since they are actively designed to harm marine life, and succeed at exactly that.

But people are looking for a means to act, and if they can participate in reduction, in any way, it's good to know that they have a target they can take aim at.

Only commercial fishing is going to ultimately impact fishing nets, and likely only when forced by punitive measures.

patwolf• 8 years ago

That does seem like a faulty metric to identify the worst pollution problems. By pure count there are probably more microbeads than cigarettes in the ocean. So this article is basically saying that of the countable pieces of pollution in the ocean, there are more pieces of cigarette butts than anything else.

I have a hard time trusting reputable news sites when they have this type of sensational reporting.

ThomasBHickey• 8 years ago

The article is really about trash on beaches (and pieces vs volume).

artie_effim• 8 years ago

Came here to say this. Honestly, the shows over folks. We are truly in the Anthropocene moving to a Blade Runner trash world. We've caught up with end-of-days sci-fi.

tzs• 8 years ago

If it was the same article I read, it was talking about garbage in the Great Garbage Patch. This article is talking about either the whole ocean or about the garbage that washes up on shore.

admax88q• 8 years ago

How do all these things end up in the ocean in the first place? Plastic straws or cigarette butts, seems like we have a garbage collection problem.

Rather than banning the item of the day that we find in the ocean, can we fix garbage collection so that none of or crap ends up there?

basic1• 8 years ago

How is something made of plant matter and paper not biodegradable anyway?

gascan3• 8 years ago

They have plastic inside them.

tunap• 8 years ago

They are biodegradeable, and do so in under 2 years. It is still littering and lame, however. I stopped asking people at yhe lake, but most ask me what I'm doing after the 1st couple p/u's & I explain I don't come out to look at trash, enough of it in the city. I then offer to share my cup/bottle/pocket to store theirs w/ mine.

Source: Poster on the wall in the Yellowstone NP gift shop.

gumby3• 8 years ago

The cigarette is made of (chemically treated) plant matter and paper, but the filter is not. Its main purpose is to turn brown when heated so the smoker thinks the filter has trapped something bad for them. A "marketing function" as the article says.

k_sh• 8 years ago

My impression is that it's largely from people littering, i.e. _not_ using garbage collection devices in the first place.

rrauenza4• 8 years ago

Most of the trash comes from Asia ... trash ends up in rivers, then the ocean.

https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-...

https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/where-is-the-plastic-in-th...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/04/explore-...

swaggyBoatswain• 8 years ago

This makes so much more sense

I never understood the hype with removing plastic straws, at least in America. From personal experience the amount of plastic straw waste is not very big. But they do cause significantly more damage to sea-life than other forms of trash.

Asia on the other hand... that's another story. Especially China. Having been there many times, can confirm people tend to care less about recycling & trash.

I have not been to the Phillipines. The government is not stable though. So it makes sense they are on this list too.

Eric_WVGG• 8 years ago

Love this project to train crows to pick cigarette butts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368

I had hoped that the vaping trend would mean fewer cigarette butts, but now I'm seeing plastic Juul capsules littered here and there. So much for ecological millennials…

soared• 8 years ago

Juul is much more a gen z thing than millenial

learnstats22• 8 years ago

I hate that project. It's completely gross to poison crows by training them to do something that we could train humans to do - with the exact same incentive system.

king_phil• 8 years ago

Is there any evidence that the crows are poisoned? Can you provide the source?

JoeAltmaier• 8 years ago

How is organic plant material in the ocean, anything but an esthetic problem?

gruez3• 8 years ago

The cellulose acetate fibers used as the predominant filter material do not readily biodegrade because of the acetyl groups on the cellulose backbone which in itself can quickly be degraded by various microorganisms employing cellulases.[23] A normal life span of a discarded filter is thought to be up to 15 years.[24]

merpnderp2• 8 years ago

This is a useful question to prompt an important answer and shouldn't have been down voted. Yes the parent should have read the article, but because the parent asked the question everyone else who's just here for the comments will see why cigarette butts aren't just harmless plant material.

kevcampb• 8 years ago

Except it isn't, it's fishing nets

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

gruez3• 8 years ago

that only talks about garbage content in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. maybe cigarette butts have different physical characteristics that causes it to accumulate differently than plastics?

edit: reading the paper further, it looks like they're only surveyed plastics, not any other materials.

Isamu• 8 years ago

From the article:

The vast majority of the 5.6 trillion cigarettes manufactured worldwide each year come with filters made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can take a decade or more to decompose

amluto• 8 years ago

The vast majority of the 5.6 trillion cigarettes manufactured worldwide each year come with filters made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can take a decade or more to decompose.

Another way of saying this is: they’re moderately biodegradable. It would seem reasonable to give manufacturers a strong incentive to make them even more biodegradable.

(To be clear, I think that smoking in public commercial spaces is seriously problematic, and I think that smokers should find a way to responsibly dispos of their trash or have one forced on them. But it does seem like the degree of blame here is a bit overblown.)

mmanfrin• 8 years ago

Cigarette butts will have fully degraded within 15 years. Plastic straws take hundreds of years unless they're flaked off by the sun and then become small plastic bits in the stomachs of fish (still undegraded). It's all bad, but cigarette butts are significantly less worse than plastic.

scoopdewoop• 8 years ago

Even considering the cartridges, vaping is much less impactful as far as littering. Even one small juul pod replaces at least a pack worth of butts. With time less wasteful designs can certainly catch on.

Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash

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