Initiatives like product redesign, extended producer responsibility, fines, penalties and promoting non-profits for awareness programmes and recycling shall be helpful to curb the issue
Cigarette butts contain heavy metals and thermoplastics that take years to decompose. Photo: iStock. Some sources of plastic pollution, such as cigarette butts, are less noticeable. These tiny items are the most littered non-biodegradable waste which form an extensive, deadly churn of plastics across all ecosystems.
Cigarette butts are the most common contributor to plastic pollution. They are made of cellulose acetate, a manufactured plastic material, and contain toxic chemicals.
Also read: World no tobacco day: Tobacco impacts environment, not just health
Cigarette filters, or the plastic part of butts, can take up to 10 years for complete degradation. They release chemicals that can persist in the environment beyond the life cycle of the cigarette butt itself.
Centre for Science and Environment, a non-profit, found that nearly 4.5 trillion cigarette filters become litter and pollute the global environment every year. Cigarette butts accumulate outside buildings, in parking lots and on streets. From here, they are often carried away to oceans by drains, rivers and other waterways.
Some 1.35 trillion filtered cigarettes were manufactured in the United States in 2007, according to media reports. About 680,000 tonnes of cellulose acetate were used to produce these filtered cigarettes.
Some 19 per cent of adults globally smoked 5.6 trillion filtered cigarettes in 2017. This is expected to surge to 9.0 trillion by 2025.
Nearly 845,000 tonnes of butts turn into a deadly churn of plastics every year and pollute oceans. Some 88,000 million cigarettes were sold in India in 2015, creating more than 240 million cigarette butts daily. A single cigarette butt has the potential to contaminate 20 millilitres of water and kill various aquatic species.
Cigarette butts contain 165 types of toxic chemicals, according to reports released by the World Health Organization and California Waste Management Bulletin.
Besides human health concerns, marine life is also affected by these toxic substances. This could lead to toxin build-up (bioaccumulation) in the food chain, eventually affecting human and marine life.
Also read: Your cigarette continues to harm environment long after it is extinguished
Environmental groups also expressed concern for marine species that ingest tiny fractions of cigarette butts.
In 2006, International Coastal Cleanup, a non-profit, collected cigarette butts, which constituted 24.7 per cent of the total accumulated marine debris.
They are the single most recovered item. Volunteers across the world collected 1,684,183 cigarette butts (33.6 per cent of the total debris) in 2007.
However, in 2022, this constituted less than five per cent of the total marine debris collected during the ‘Clean Coast and Safe Sea’ campaign. This campaign is an initiative of the Ministry of Earth Sciences to clean 75 beaches in 75 days across the 7,517-kilometre-long Indian coastline.
A WHO report titled ‘Tobacco and its environmental impact: an overview’, published in 2017, noted the chemical composition of cigarette butts.
They contain heavy metals and thermoplastics that take years to decompose. Used butts contain toxic chemicals like cellulose acetate, vinyl chloride, benzopyrene, lead, carbon monoxide, benzopyrene and styrene. Cellulose acetate is photodegradable but not bio-degradable.
In 2017, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) slammed the ministry of environment for terming cigarette butts as ‘biodegradable’.
A plea by a non-profit claimed that cigarette butts are ‘concentrated toxic waste dumps’ and that their improper disposal causes environmental problems.
And in September 2020, the NGT directed the Central Pollution Control Board to lay down guidelines on the disposal of cigarette butts and bidis.
Over the last four decades, approximately 10 million cigarettes have been sold every minute globally. Each filter butt weighs about 0.2 grams —leading to annual plastic pollution of 1,051,200 tonnes.
It is also a part of municipal waste and brings additional segregation and collection burdens on the local authority.
“It’s very important to implement producer responsibility regulation to reduce mitigate and prevent the manufacturing of single-use filters,” said Khalid Boudali, deputy presiding officer, ECOSOCC, African Union, told news agency ANI.
The European Union recently passed a ‘circular economy’ law that includes Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). EPR shifts the responsibility to manufacturers and insists they consider redesigning products to minimise environmental consequences.
Local authorities should come up with rules and regulations to protect the environment from non-biodegradable cigarette butt waste by:
Implementing a consumer-funded Advanced Recycling Fee; or waste fee for cigarettes at the point of purchase. These fees are intended to pay for the costs of collecting, recycling and properly disposing of cigarette butts.
Cities like San Francisco have added additional cigarette taxes to compensate for the cost of waste management. It helps clean up more than half the cigarette butts and packaging litter from the streets.
The city now charges a 60-cent fee on packs of cigarettes to cover clean-up costs and is the first city, back in 2009, to levy a cigarette litter abatement fee.
Urban local bodies should enforce laws and fines against littering and violations of smoking bans in public places and beaches to compensate for the costs of cleaning up and disposing of cigarette waste.
Awareness and cleaning campaigns like Nitri Datta’s ButtRush, a marathon to collect and recycle tonnes of cigarette waste, can help deal with the menace. The campaign Could collect nearly one crore cigarette butts in 2021, weighing around three tonnes.
Similarly, the Noida-based start-up code buys cigarette butts at Rs 800 per kg and recycles them to make durable items like home decor, mosquito repellents, compost ash, etc.
Initiatives like product redesign, extended producer responsibility, fines, penalties and promoting non-profits for awareness programmes and recycling shall be helpful to curb the issue.
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