A single cigarette butt can contaminate up to 1,000 liters of water “in concentrations that exceed safety limits for aquatic life,” releasing nicotine quickly and more than 7,000 toxic chemicals into urban drinking water.
The warning was issued by pharmaceutical company Aflofarm, which estimates that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded annually worldwide.
Because their cellulose acetate filters are made of non-biodegradable plastic, they represent the second largest source of plastic pollution on the planet.
This pollution consumes 22 billion tonnes of water, destroys 600 million trees annually and costs more than 8 million lives per year, according to the press release, which also warned about the risks associated with waste from this industry on Spanish beaches.
“The most vulnerable are also the most exposed,” the report reads, citing children and pets.
In the first case, because the chemical residues of tobacco adhere to toys, clothes and surfaces long after the cigarette has been extinguished, and in the second, because ingestion of cigarette butts or contact with the “secondhand smoke” that lingers in the sand can cause poisoning.
The laboratory proposes five recommendations to deal with these risks and achieve a “healthier summer for the body and the environment” during the summer holidays, starting by recognizing the automatic nature of the act of smoking, since the strong urge to smoke “lasts only between 1 and 2 minutes”.
Therefore, the pharmaceutical company suggests stopping and breathing in the sea air to curb the urge to light a cigarette.
The second measure is to protect children and pets by avoiding smoking in their presence, and the third and most crucial is to always collect cigarette butts rather than leave them on the beach, as they are “dangerous waste, not ordinary trash”.
The other two recommendations are to replace smoking after lunch with other routines, such as a walk on the beach, “weakening the psychological association with the habit and taking advantage of the environment to unplug,” and to seek professional help to quit smoking, since this reduces the risk of coronary disease by 50% in a year and improves lung function in a few weeks.
