About 65% of smokers simply dispose of their spent cigarette butts by dropping them on the ground. When you consider that every year roughly five trillion (yes, I said trillion) cigarette butts are created; that’s a lot of butts being abandoned on sidewalks, left waiting for the next rainstorm to whisk them off to the sea.
According to Professor Kelly Lee of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, one cigarette butt in a liter of water will kill any fish in that container.
Aquatic life often confuses butts with food and chokes on them. Additionally, with over 7,000 chemicals in each cigarette, even if they don’t eat the butts, fish often die from other health issues created from living in water polluted by contaminated filters.
For the billions of abandoned cigarette butts not finding their way to the drainage system; cities spend millions of dollars every year sweeping them up.
In Vancouver, and a growing number of Canadian and American cites, there is a push for tobacco companies to create filter-less cigarettes and be responsible for paying some or all the cost to clean up the used cigarette butts.
For more information and to see the news story go to //globalnews.ca/news/4418956/cigarette-butts-ocean-pollution-ban/
By Phil Berbig