#21. No Butts About It
In which the E@L smokes out the toxic truth about cigarette butts
Dear Reader - I’m trying an experiment this month. This post will be accompanied by my first ever podcast. You’ll probably get a separate email announcing it. I’m hoping some of you will listen to it and provide me with some constructive feedback that will help me determine if future podcasts would be worthwhile. Now, on with the show…
Do you want to help save the ocean? (or Chesapeake Bay? Puget Sound? <input your favorite body of water [here]>. Here is my unfiltered advice: quit smoking. Why? Because cigarette butts are toxic to the fish, plankton, and everything else that lives in the Ocean/Bay/Sound/etc. No ifs, ands, or butts about it.
What’s the Butt?
Cigarette butts consist of filters, paper, and some remaining tobacco attached to them. After being discarded, butts are often eaten by wildlife. Butts in the water can be consumed by fish. Birds have been seen trying to feed butts to their chicks. Once eaten, the butts can block their digestive tracts, or slowly release toxic chemicals, killing the animal. If not eaten, they decompose into tiny micro-plastic particles that enter the food chain indirectly. Virtually all seafood contains microplastics, and they are now in our bodies too.
The biggest part of the butt problem is the filter itself. Cigarette filters are composed of cellulose acetate, a non-biodegradable type of plastic that takes decades to decompose. And the truth is that there is absolutely no need for them. Single use plastic filters serve no purpose whatsoever other than marketing – they don’t make cigarettes “healthier” but may make them easier to smoke. This has the rather ironic effect of increasing the risks of addiction and cancer. So, cigarettes with filters are actually more of a hazard to the smoker than those without.
But butts don’t have to be eaten to be deadly. Cigarette tobacco contains nicotine which is a natural pesticide, as toxic to small aquatic crustaceans as it is to crop-eating insects. In fact, neonicotinoid compounds are now the most widely used class of insecticides in the world, and are a danger to aquatic invertebrates, beneficial insects, and pollinators. In addition to nicotine, cigarettes contain over 4000 known chemicals including 600 additives that affect taste and smoothness, and even desensitize the throats of smokers to the damage being done. Some of the chemicals are highly toxic, including benzo(a)anthracene, benzo(a)pyrene, acenaphthene, fluorene, arsenic, and lead. Those chemicals remain in the butts and are released over time.
A Four-day Work Week?
Scientists have tested the toxicity of cigarette butts on aquatic organisms using a standard dose-response test. Cigarette butts are first soaked in water, after which the water, called leachate, is then diluted to a range of concentrations anywhere from 20 butts per liter (bpl) down to 1/8 bpl. Test organisms are then held in the butt-water for up to 96 hours. These kinds of bioassays have been used to study the effect of cigarette butts on topsmelt (akin to the bay anchovy common in Chesapeake Bay) and Daphnia, a freshwater crustacean commonly consumed by fish.
Why do you suppose 96 hours became the international standard test-time? Because, like you, we scientists don’t like to work on weekends either. So, they spend Monday morning setting up the test (making dilutions, counting fish, etc), and are ready to start the test around noon. After placing a number of test organisms in each container with the butt-water, they leave them there for four days. Someone (e.g. a technician or grad student) checks them daily and may replace the test water as well. Observations may be made daily, at 24, 48, and 72 hours of exposure. On Friday, after 96 hours of exposure to the toxin, the test organisms are removed and counted. Then everybody goes home for the weekend. Except maybe the fish.
Typically, most of the organisms exposed to low doses of leachate survive, whereas more of those exposed to higher doses may die. Many studies look for sublethal effects as well, such as changes in growth, development, heartbeat rate, or abnormal swimming behavior. The test concentration that kills 50% of the organisms (known as the LC50, or Lethal Concentration) is then calculated. For topsmelt, the LC50 was 1 butt per liter, but for Daphnia, it was only 0.05. That is, one cigarette butt in a liter of water would kill half the fish present, but (no pun intended) only 1/20th of a butt would kill half the Daphnia. Other studies have demonstrated that butts can cause changes in development, heart rate, behavior, and mortality of fish larvae.
Get Off Your Butt
If smokers would dispose of all their butts in containers, we wouldn’t have this problem. But over 65% of cigarette butts are disposed of outdoors. In fact, butts are the No. 1 most common type of litter in the world and are the most commonly collected item in beach cleanup efforts. Over 750,000 metric tons of cigarette butts are discarded each year. Every butt that is thrown out a car window eventually ends up in the water system, decomposing and emitting toxic chemicals and microplastics, if not eaten by wildlife. In Europe, cigarette butts have been shown to meet two of the Hazard Properties (HP) of the Waste Framework Directive, for toxicity (HP6) and ecotoxicity (HP14).
So, what can we do about this problem? We can tackle it on many levels from local to national. At the local level, we can ban smoking on beaches. Spain has done this on many of their beaches, preventing the discard of many tons of butt-trash. Ocean City, MD, has instituted “smoking areas” on their beaches with butt receptacles (insert joke about sunbathers here), but this is an unenforced “honor” system with no teeth.
At the State level, we can add environmental taxes that increase the cost of cigarettes or require a “filter deposit”. This has already been done in some countries. That won’t prevent smokers from buying them, but the revenue can be used to help clean up beach debris or fund anti-smoking campaigns.
At the National level, we can (ask our legislators to) ban the production of cigarette filters, and demand that cigarette companies pay for the costs of cleanup, as France has done. California has tried this unsuccessfully, but some communities have banned the sale of cigarettes within their limits. There has even been some progress incorporating small quantities of cigarette butts into bricks or other ceramic materials.
This article is probably not going to convince many smokers to clean up their act. But maybe it will spur activists within our communities to propose some of these ideas. The health of our oceans, the Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and many other bodies of water depends on it. And I’m not just blowing smoke.
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