The Butts Remain :
According to ButtsOut, cigarette butt litter is the world's greatest environmental litter problem with approx 4.3 trillion cigarette butts tossed onto roads, pavements, beaches, parks, forests and in waterways every year.
Mark Olmsted: Every Little Bit Hurts -- Figuring out Trashy Behavior
So the first day I decided to start picking up trash in my neighborhood, I stuffed my pockets with Ralph's grocery bags, (thank God for...
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The ones who need to QUIT, for the sake of our environment and Human Health, are those who contaminate tobacco farmlands, typical (very non-organic) cigarettes, and unwitting victims' lungs with residues of any of 450 US Registered Tobacco Pesticides.
Many of those pesticides are chlorine chemicals that, when burned, produce dioxins, easily the worst human carcinogens ever to come from industry. Remember Agent Orange and Love Canal? The cigarette and pesticide firms apparently do not---or they, and the corrupted regulators who allow this---don't care.
Beyond that, it is still legal to use tobacco fertilizers that are contaminated with cancer-causing PO-210 radiation that goes on to contaminate the cigarettes, and then the furthest reaches of lungs.
Concerns about cigarette litter, or "smelly hair", or even about tobacco causing diseases that cannot possibly be caused by smoke from any natural plant, are all distractions from the industrial roots of smoking and health problems. Often these distractions are intentional components of large-scale evasion of civil and even criminal charges.
Incidentally---those pesticides and fertilizers, easily the most deadly contaminants of typical cigarettes, are excluded from the new FDA law about "regulating tobacco". And, if the FDA lowers nicotine levels, it will encourage more exposures to those substances.
A lot of people smoke cigarettes, they release smoke, environment is polluted by smokers. My suggestion is.... Please quit smoking for environment and next generation .
http://www.greenearthtraveler.org/
Smoking is not bad, tobacco doesn't kill people. It's the way people use tobacco obsessively, and the additives cigarette companies put in, that kill people. Don't villianize smoking or tobacco, just the destructive human behavior that abuses it. If people rolled there own filterless cigarettes, there would be not waste. They would also smoke less because filters allow one to smoke more with less irritation, and the time it takes to roll your own takes time and you actually have to think about what you are doing.
4.3 trillion a year?! I h ate it when someone throws their butt out the car window. I used to smoke, but I always kept them in a container inside my car and threw them away in a trash bin. If you smoke and don't have a place to throw it you should pinch off the cherry (stomp out of course) and put the filter in your pocket until you can throw it out. If people would just do their part and go that extra step it would add up. I don't buy water, I take public transportation in case someone wants to attack me. :o)
I smoked for more than 10 years and now I've completely stopped smoking normal cigarettes and made the switch to electronic ones. I can breathe easier, no longer cough and no longer have a gross coated throat.
After searching online for various companies and researching prices, I decided to buy from www.FreshSmoking.com . They've got the best prices, their starter kits are only $49.95 and the rest of their accessories and cartridges are much cheaper than any I've seen. Also, their customer service was amazing and I received my order lightening fast. I highly recommend them.
Thanks for advertising.
Smoke original Camels; no polluting butts, great taste, same brutal toxins that killed John Wayne. mmmmmmmmmmmmmm
The answer is for the cigarette companies to make the butts (filters) completely biodegradable. If this were to happen, cigarette butts would only be a temporary eyesore, and not an environmental problem. Unfiltered cigarette butts are, and have always been, completely biodegradable.
While you're at it, turn off your home's air conditioner.
Even when I was a smoker, I was generally fastidious about what I did with my butts. I am also surprised to learn that they take 25 years to decompose... makes me wonder what the heck they're made of.
But I have to say that some of the statistics in this article make no sense. Butts are FIFTY PERCENT of the litter on the planet? Do they mean by quanitity? They can't mean by volume... one styrofoam cup has got to be ten times the volume of a butt. And by litter, do they mean things that are simply dropped rather than put in appropriate receptacles? Or do they mean all of the stuff that ends up in the environment, whether in the landfill or elsewhere?
Even at my heaviest period of smoking (10-15 per day), there's no way that the volume of those butts exceeded the combined volume of everything else I threw away in a 24-hour period. That makes no sense at all.
They will represent their statistics in the most alarming way possible.
I was surprised and skeptical at that stat also Bass... my son had a summer job cleaning up a stretch of road leading to a new housing project (the builder paid him) and his experience was that the litter was predominantly beverage containers. Pop cans, McDonald cups, coffee shop cups made up more than 1/3 of the litter he picked up. Tossed garbage bags came in 2nd and then it was a very mixed variety after that. He picked up butts but I didn't ever hear him complain about their volume.
I've never smoked so I've never disposed of a butt, but I have to say, I didn't realize they weren't easily degradable. To read that it takes 25 years to break down shocked me and I'll be bringing it up to my smoker friends. Even though every smoker I know wishes they could stop, I don't think any of them are aware of the fact that it takes 25 years either. I know people who would never throw litter of any other kind on the ground who routinely dispose of butts that way.
At a US Park Ranger station, I once visited, had a sign published by the DNR that listed decomposition time for litter... wish I had it to reproduce... anyway butts were listed to take five years to decompose... the same time as ORANGE PEELS... guess it depends who you wish to believe.
Again studies seem to be slanted to prove anything the quoter wishes to prove... take all studies with a grain of salt...
Remember when eating eggs would kill you?
I have orange peel in my compost tumbler... it doesn't take 5 years!
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First Posted: 05-29-09 08:42 AM | Updated: 06-29-09 05:12 AM