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Writer's pictureTijana Ivanovic

Cigarette Butts Meet the Environment: Consequences of Littering

Can you recall a single train station, concert area, or a parking lot where you didn’t see cigarette butts laying around? It is virtually impossible to successfully picture the environment without one. Discarded cigarette butts are everywhere, yet you don’t need much intuition to know they do not belong in rivers, in arable land, in beach sand, in the forest, or on the floor NEXT to a trash bin.


I am no moral police for smokers, but as an environmental scientist, I can tell you that littered cigarette butts are much more than an aesthetic problem. Cigarette filters are made out of cellulose acetate, which makes them plastic waste. Suffice to say that butts are the most commonly littered (i.e. inappropriately disposed of) marine debris in existence! If data of Ocean Conservancy is taken into account, the famous battle to ban plastic straws should effectively be against cigarette butts since butts are the unbeatable #1 on the top 10 list of marine litter. Straws come in 7th.

The French Ministry of Environment recently published a report in which it states that this 67-million country throws 23.5 BILLION cigarette butts on streets every year. Add some more data to it (18 million smokers), since non-smokers or 5-year olds do not litter cigarette products; that means an average smoker inappropriately discards 1305 cigarette butts every year. France is not alone, but its Government is doing something now! According to National Geographic, the world litters a staggering 6.5 trillion cigarette butts a year. [The net worth of the richest man on Earth, Jeff Bezos, is 201 billion $ and that is an unimaginable amount. 6.5 trillion is 32 times more than his crazy number.]


To understand what are the major problems with littering cigarette butts, let me tell you a story of Filti & Siri. Let’s imagine our used cigarette filter - Filthy, known as Filti to his friends. His guardian didn’t take him on a date with Bin, so now Filti is in for a treat. Tonight it rains heavily and Filti is stranded outside on the sidewalk. The Cleaner is done for the day, so Filti doesn’t get a second chance at his date. As the storm comes, Filti gets a free ride down the water park streets of Lausanne. He ends up at the exit for non-paying customers - the sewage system where he chills with other hazardous friends: Floss, Make up Removers & well you guessed it… Because the storm came in very strong, the wastewater treatment plant cannot cope with all the incoming rain and sewage mix. Hence, Filti is sent on a diversion lane to meet Lake directly without any actions from the treatment plant (a standard procedure in case of heavy rain). Here is a tricky part. Filti doesn’t like Lake & friends, because they make him feel like he doesn’t belong there. Filti goes on a revenge mission and decides to leave all his poison with the Lake. And when he does just that, he floats around hoping for a poor victim to mix him up with food. Fish did it this time, but Bird took care of Filti’s friend. And what about Filti’s first cousin - Piri? The cigarette butt that the guardian throws on the forest parking in summer? The one that eventually starts major forest fires, claims numerous speechless souls and decades of recovery? Note that 85% of forest fires start by human negligence or accidents and are now raging due to extreme droughts and climate change. Greece, Turkey, USA, Australia... No difference. Filti & Piri would have much preferred to go out with their Bin partners, but their guardians were not granting them last wishes. What the first guardian didn’t realize is that he was poisoning his own water well. One thing even Roman armies knew how to use against their enemies. The other one just burned vast surfaces of land - something which Romans were also successful in doing.


When cigarette butts meet the built & natural environment: Filti ☠️ & Piri 🔥 in action. Drawing by blog author. :)


If you have been paying attention, you would have picked up 3 key issues of littered cigarette butts:

  1. Cigarette butts leak hazardous chemicals in contact with water (rain, pond, lakes, rivers, sea, ocean..). Just think about it for a second. Cigarette filters are invented to minimize the exposure of the smoker to a myriad of nasty chemicals. All smoke of burning additives, pesticides traces, everything that is used in the production of cigarettes goes first through the filter, then to the lungs. If cigarette smoke is proven to be carcinogenic, then used filters are the same. Unfortunately in contact with water - all these toxic chemicals are dissolved and pollutants are transmitted to a new environment, be that water bodies, forests, arable land, or else. Researchers already proved that the leachate from butts is acutely toxic to fish.

  2. Cigarette butts are hazardous to animals who mistake them for food. This is specifically a problem in coastal environments. Biologists continuously find birds and smaller animals with intestines full of littered plastic waste. Just see the picture of a bird mother feeding her little one with a butt.

  3. Cigarette butts present a fire danger. Again, there is a reason why smoking at the petrol station or in gun powder facilities is forbidden. In forests, pine needles and cones are bone dry and waiting for a first spark to just go up in flames claiming lives, biodiversity, property, infrastructure, etc.

Good news is that this is very easily preventable pollution! Act to minimize littering and there is a plethora of options.


Portable & personal ashtrays. I recently saw some sort of ashtray on a stand which you stick in the grass and then when you are done, you bring it back. Easy peasy. There is also an option to bring with you a small closed portable ashtrays. No bigger than size of mint packs, these metal-based enclosed ashtrays can be packed with butts and emptied at the first trash can.

Public order police & higher penalties. Where consiousness does not work, good old "Please pay" will. Higher penalties issued by new types of police units are coming in Switzerland (btw perceived as a “super clean” country) for all sorts of litter. A current federal proposal is to raise it to a 300 CHF flat fine for such an improper behavior (Source: RTS).


Awareness & risk campaigns. Tell your smoker friends about this. Send them the link to this blog post. There is no shame in not knowing, there is shame in knowing and not acting.


How not to (left) and how to (right) dispose of cigarette butts? Picture on the left (credits Fabrice Amadeo via LinkedIn) is from a recent clean up of 500m-stretch of beach in Marseille where volunteers recovered 30.000 cigarette butts. On the right: Cigarette bins at train stations at there to be used.


And finally, if you were wondering whether changing the filter itself is a good idea, I have an answer. Recently an article about an innovative biodegradable cigarette filter attracted my attention and I thought it to be an odd proposition. The young innovators created new “biofilters” under the premise that if they leak into nature, cigarette filters should biodegrade. In my professional view this is the last solution we should aim for, not to mention one which mixes up unused cigarette filters and cigarette butts. Simply, if the “poisonous” character of butts stems from chemicals trapped inside the filter (as shown above), then what is the benefit of making the used filters decompose in nature? Even if the clean filter material has the potential to biodegrade, whether the optimal conditions (of humidity, oxygen, water, saprophytic culture) are met is a million $ question. Not to mention - which bacteria or fungi will be happy to hook onto a filter full of killing chemicals to “eat it up as their food”? Or better yet, would you eat a tomato which grew out of a cigarette butt stuffed with carcinogenics? "Biodegredable" filter is a way to calm the mind of the person littering… it is not a remedy for improper behavior.


Naturally, the ultimate solution to all these issues is to quit smoking altogether for the sake of your health and many around you. The environment comes in third.


Honestly, consciously and informedly,


P.S. This is not my first time addressing issues related to cigarette butts. I realized the extend of this problem back in 2016 when Milica Škaro & Stefan Raičević invited me to give a speech on this issue in their NGO project. Thank you for that! I would also like to thank Alexis Baron, my EPFL colleague with whom I did a great waste management project for lake Geneva on this topic.


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