Cigarette Butts, Packaging, Make Up 90% of All Litter

by Tina Kells | February 11, 2009 at 04:15 pm

1061 views | 10 Recommendations | 10 comments

It seems that cigarettes don't just add to air pollution, they make up the majority of street pollution as well. An experiment conducted in Nova Scotia, Canada, identified cigarette butts and cigarette packaging as accounting for 90% of all the litter found on the streets of that province.

They ended up collecting 16,000 pieces of litter the size of a bottle cap or bigger — an increase of 21 per cent since 2004, the Environment Department says.
Cigarette butts and packaging made up nearly 90 per cent of the litter. Snack (chip bags, wrappers, candies, gum) and fast foods (containers, cups, trays, condiment packets, napkins) came a distant second.

The number of drink containers littering Nova Scotia continues to drop since 1989, when they made up more than seven out of every 10 items collected. That decline is attributed to the deposit system, which was introduced in 1996.

Percentage-wise, snack food and tobacco litter have gone up over the years.

It makes you wonder how much of the litter in other, larger cities can be attributed to smokers. The already startling list of the social cost of smoking just continues to grow.

We already know the negative effects of second hand smoke, and now third hand smoke (the fumes that waft off of smokers) have also been identified as toxic. The prenatal impact of cigarettes is also well documented and include everything from low birth weights to a higher risk for SIDS. And of course there's that whole cancer thing...

A stray cigarette butt was identified as the cause of one of the devastating California wildfires that destroyed 800 homes and ravaged more than 40,000 acres of land in 2008. That would be one of those cigarette butts that make up 90% of all litter, by the way. Year after year cigarette butts are the leading cause of structure fires and fires sparked by cigarettes account for the majority of fire fatalities.

Cigarettes are the leading cause of fire death in the nation. In 2001 alone, there were 31,200 such fires nationwide, resulting in 830 deaths, thousands of serious injuries and $386 million in direct property damage, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Many of the victims of cigarette fires are non-smokers, including children, family members, neighbors and firefighters.

When you add everything up; the social costs, the insurance pay outs, the lives lost, the health concerns, and the cost of smoking related medical care it begs the question, why are cigarettes still legal? Cigarettes are already heavily taxed but those tax dollars do not even begin to match the combined sums of the damage cigarettes do, both in dollar amounts and human terms.

Adjustments for future costs if smoking had not occurred and smokers had not died were estimated to be $1.5 billion. According to this analysis, smokers cost society about $15 billion while contributing roughly $7.8 billion in taxes. The results indicate that smoking-attributable costs in Canada have increased steadily since 1966 to the 1991 value of $15 billion

The above statistics are old, from 1991, but they are the last time I was able to find such figures for Canada. It seems that a dollar comparison of tax revenue to health care costs is something that all but the most staunchly anti-smoking organisations are reluctant to make. But you don't have to be a math whiz to know that the costs of smoking to society as a whole are high and the collective benefits are very few.

Now it seems we can add cleaner streets to the list of things that will only get better when smoking is finally banned.

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Jon Azpiri

at 16:32 on February 11th, 2009

A few years ago, Nova Scotia conducted another study that found that 22 percent of litter in the province consisted of Tim Horton's coffee cups. Perhaps Jim Jarmusch should have filmed "Coffee and Cigarettes" in Nova Scotia.

Corn Husk

at 16:58 on February 11th, 2009

Corn Husk has contributed a photo to this story.

kuuva

at 18:24 on February 11th, 2009

i cant wait until cigarette smoking is banned. i remember when i visited Italy years ago and cigarette butts were everywhere. these days everything is much cleaner now that Europe is pushing for a cigarette free society. The US is doing pretty good too.

kingpaddy

at 19:40 on February 11th, 2009

Earth needs a detox.

According to W.H.O. whose most recent data is from 2005 (complete) the United States had the lowest percent of smokers (11%) of any of the listed 42 industrial nations. My work in anthropology allows me a glimpse of such information when building models of patterns of human growth. Genetic changes from Parents to the five stages of child growth are well marked now. The data sets for second hand smoke are unreliable as health indicators as university research has partially been based on an anti-smoking agenda thereby making an issue where we need hard data tainted. Third hand smoke data has not been collected in a long term double-blinded environment.

To the core of your reporting I am not suprised that cigarette filters are a major percentage of liter. They will never break down in nature and are practicly indistructable.

I enjoyed reading your editorial. Good style, easy read. Barry Bogan PhD. is a good source for Physical Anthropology information and biologic, biocultural information as is data collected by WHO.

158

at 19:43 on February 11th, 2009

One more reason not to smoke.

tikun

at 03:50 on February 12th, 2009

If government officials globally would make littering a very expensive proposition then maybe we could get a handle on this one.

Paschen

at 05:07 on February 12th, 2009

http://www.bra.org/curriculum/A13.pdf

http://www.calgary.ca/docgallery/bu/sws/household_garbage_breakdown.pdf

http://www.calgary.ca/portal/server.pt/gateway/PTARGS_0_0_780_237_0_43/http%3B/content.calgary.ca/CCA/City+Hall/Business+Units/Waste+and+Recycling+Services/City+Initiatives/History+of+Garbage.htm

Yard waste 19%

Other 15%

Plastics 9%

Construction &

Demolition 4%

Metal 3%

Glass 2%

Food waste 23%

waste includes: paper (25%), food waste (23%), yard waste (19%), plastic (9%), metal (3%), glass (2%), household hazardous waste (1%) and other (15%). Download the Household garbage breakdown chart (143 KB).

gumbootspearlz

at 15:22 on February 12th, 2009

It is heartbreaking to see cigarette butts on pristine beaches. I photograph things like this when I see them to witness litter and remind people to clean up. Australia's Clean Up Day is coming up on Sunday 1st March 2009 - I wonder how many cigarette butts will be picked up that day. I know my family and friends are pitching in to help clean up!

Thanks for inviting my photograph here. Gumbootspearlz...

http://events.cleanup.org.au/

More of my photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gumbootspearlz/