Please Stop Smoking and Carry a Ciggy Butt Bag Until You Do

Spring in Blom | Daria Werbowy by Inez & Winoodh for Vogue Paris April 2006In the ‘things I never knew’ column is the fact that quitting smoking is almost as good for the environment and all your friends, as it is for your own health. No lectures about the fact that smoking is the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the US, responsible for 400,000 deaths each year.

These statistics, along with multiple cases of family smokers’s agony, are emblazoned in my brain. I had no idea that the remnants of cigarette smoking represent the most prevalent form of litter collected across the world. Like the pooper scooper, every smoker needs a ciggy butt bag.

According to data from the Ocean Conservancy, in 2009 more than 3 million cigarettes or butts were picked up internationally from beaches and inland waterways as part of the annual International Coastal Cleanup, including more than 1 million from U.S. beaches alone, making it by far the most littered item.

Grist’s Go green this Earth Day: Quit Smoking educates us about soil depletion and cutting down trees,  standard eco-educational facts.

It’s the littering and cleanup facts about cigarette butts that stunned me. Research indicates that smokes and non alike often believe that cigarette butts are biodegradable. Because of their small size, we don’t take cigarette butts seriously as litter.

An economic cigarette butt litter audit in San Francisco, which found the annual cleanup cost to be more than $7 million annually, led its City Council in 2009 to impose a 20-cent-per-pack “litter fee” on cigarettes sold in the city.

Surely smokers would be more conscientious about the environmental damage from cigarette butts if they knew the entire story. For me, reading the Grist article was a lightbulb moment. Anne 

More reading: there is a much more effective biodegradable cigarette, which is hardly my desire to advocate. The producer of Greenbutts says when a green butt is placed under a thin layer of soil it sprouts into green grass shoots or even blooming flowers. OK, nice story but better to stop smoking and plant tulip bulbs in the fall.