Butt they're only small...

On Saturday we held Phoebe’s Walk at Delmar Presbyterian.  If you missed what that is all about, then read back a couple of weeks, but essentially we walked the neighborhoods around the church, picking up litter.  While a lot of what we found was expected - plastic bags, cans, bottles – some was definitely not – a slate roofing sample, a rusted aerosol can, a plastic bat (of the furry and flying variety) and a tire.  The single item we found in the highest numbers was a really small thing that you might overlook if you were not explicitly looking for trash, namely cigarette butts.  One team insists that they counted over nine hundred that they personally collected leading us to estimate that between all of the teams we probably picked up over a thousand.  Which leads me to ask, was this expected?  Or is Bethlehem just populated with a lot of heavy smokers?  And, if it was to be expected, how much of an environmental problem are cigarette butts?

Cigarette butts are actually the most common form of single-use plastic pollution, ahead of things we’ve all heard campaigned against like plastic bottles, straws and bags.  As with everything on the internet, there are a lot of numbers floating around.  The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered every year.  That’s a big number and hard to visualize, so the WHO helpfully points out that that would fill 60,000 shipping containers, that you’d need 30 ships to load onto or that the cigarette butts would fill 528 Olympic swimming pools.  They look ugly, lying all over the sidewalks and road edges, but are they actually causing any harm to our environment aside from being an eyesore?

Cigarette butts are mostly made up of the filter with some paper wrapped around it and maybe a little unburnt tobacco on the end.  The filters themselves may look a bit like cotton wool or paper but they’re actually made up of a material called plasticized cellulose acetate.  Cellulose acetate is the same material used in camera film, for those of us old enough to remember the analog days of photography. In order for it to work as a filter, the plastic is in the form of tens of thousands of very thin fibers, all held together by a plastic glue.  During smoking, little tiny pieces of fiber are inhaled by the smoker into their lungs.  And once the cigarette butt is on the ground or in the water, it releases microplastics into the environment.  They are not biodegradable, but will break down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic garbage that pollute our soil and water.

Apart from the microplastics, cigarette butts are loaded with chemicals.  Ocean Care, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Switzerland, estimates that there are over 7,000 toxic chemicals in cigarette butts.  These can all potentially leach out into water and soil.  250 of them are known to be harmful and 69 are carcinogenic.  The toxic chemicals include arsenic, used as a rat poison, nicotine, which is an insecticide, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which cause cancer, cardiovascular disease and fetal developmental defects.  These chemicals are washed into our drinking water and taken up by plants that we and other animals eat.  Many of the chemicals are not removed by municipal water filtration, meaning they’re making their way into our homes.  It turns out you don’t even have to smoke to be exposed to all the cancer-causing chemicals in cigarettes, you actually just have to drink water out of your tap. In terms of the cost to animals in the environment, an experiment in the UK in 2020 showed that just five cigarette butts in a liter of water killed 60 to 100% of four types of freshwater invertebrates in five days.  Another experiment in California showed that just one cigarette butt in a liter of water was enough to kill half of the fish exposed to it. 4.5 trillion cigarette butts adds up to a lot of dead fish and other water-dwelling animals.

Pastor Ken would probably have something to say, while wearing his firefighter’s helmet, if I didn’t also point out that discarded cigarette butts contribute to wildfires.  According to the Forest Service, smoking caused an average of 1,700 wildfires per year between 2010 and 2020.  Admittedly this is down about 90% from the 1980s, largely driven by cigarettes being mandated to be “fire-safe”, by being self-extinguishing when not actively being puffed, but also due to an overall decline in the number of smokers in the United States.  Even so, 1,700 is a lot of wildfires and an added demerit mark for cigarettes in terms of their environmental impact.

In any case, there are now a thousand cigarette butts that are not threatening the soil and water of Bethlehem, but there’s still clearly work to do.  As an Earth Care Congregation, we’re going to keep looking at how we can impact the health of our local environment.  We’d love for you to join us.

If you want to learn more about Earth Care at Delmar Presbyterian Church, contact us at office@delmarpres.org