No butts about it, cigarette butts are harming our seas and the creatures in them. That’s why for National Sea Week 2021, Sustainability Trust is choosing to highlight the issue and run ‘street sweeps’ throughout the week.

“Most people are aware that littering is bad for sea life, but cigarette butts still aren’t counted as litter by many people, even though they’re incredibly toxic and harmful,’ says Sustainability Trust Educator, Caroline Arrowsmith.

Cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate - a type of non-biodegradable plastic that is harmful to sea life.

Cigarette butts do damage far beyond the plastic pollution left in our environment. Once littered they leach toxic chemicals—including acetic acid, hexamine, arsenic, and chromium—into our water table, where these chemicals can remain for as many as 10 years and can be poisonous to the fish and wildlife that ingest them. “Just one butt in a litre of water is enough to kill a fish” says Arrowsmith.

Cigarette butts also have long-lasting negative effects on soil health and plant germination.

Research has found that the presence of cigarette butts in the soil reduces germination success and shoot length (the length of the stem) of clover by 27% and 28% respectively, while root biomass (root weight) reduced by 57%. For grass, germination success reduced by 10% and shoot length by 13%.

An estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered every year, making them the most pervasive form of plastic pollution on the planet.

“There’s no doubt that cigarette butt pollution is a big problem for our environment. Just one cigarette butt flicked away multiplied by the millions of people who do it, easily makes them the most commonly found form of pollution in our seas and on our streets” says Arrowsmith.

If you’d like to help clean up the streets and save our sea life, you can join Sustainability Trust on one of their street sweeps from 12.30 pm to 1.30 pm on Wednesday, 8 March and Friday, 12 March 2021- sign up here

For more information, head to https://sustaintrust.org.nz/our-events/sea-week

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