Come on cigarette guy, you’re better than that
While volunteering helping drivers find parking spots at Pony Pasture Sunday, I picked up litter walking around in the lot. There was mostly just little pieces of plastic and paper, but I’d say I picked up about 200 cigarette butts. Come on cigarette guy, you’re better than that.Seriously, if you are a smoker, you know better […]
While volunteering helping drivers find parking spots at Pony Pasture Sunday, I picked up litter walking around in the lot. There was mostly just little pieces of plastic and paper, but I’d say I picked up about 200 cigarette butts. Come on cigarette guy, you’re better than that.Seriously, if you are a smoker, you know better than that. The worst spot was the three-car police, fire and EMS parking spot just to the west of the park entrance. I got about 50 butts there. Lazy and unacceptable people.
The filters are the problem. Break off the filter and throw out the tobacco part if you have to. My brother, who is a smoker, used to break off the filter and put them in his pocket if he was away from a trash can.
There is some good information from CigaretteLitter.org and from Clean Virginia Waterways:
Most cigarette filters are composed of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic. The white fibers you see in a cigarette filter are NOT cotton, but a plastic that can persist in the environment as long as other forms of plastic.
Clean Virginia Waterways has looked extensively for a published, scientific research paper on the topic of how long cigarette butts take to degrade, and could find none. (If you know of one, please send us an email with details.) Various sources have stated that cigarette filters take 18 months to 10 years to degrade. It is safe to say that the cellulose acetate fibers in cigarette filters, like other plastics, are with us for some time after they are discarded. Since environments differ—some places are wetter, dryer, sunnier, colder, hotter, windy, etc.—so too will the degrading time differ.
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