Hundreds of cigarette butts are dumped each day on almost every busy Mediterranean beach in Spain during the increasingly long tourist season.
This equates to hundreds of thousands of polluting remnants discarded by thoughtless smokers.
During eight months of the year, I regularly pick up between 10 and 20 butts from a very small section of beach in the south of Guardamar del Segura (Alicante province).
People can be seen stubbing out their cigarettes in the sand without a thought to the damage they are doing to the environment.
Information provided by the ministry for the ecological transition (Miteco) states that butts take between 10 and 15 years to fully degrade.
When they end up in the sea, a single butt can contaminate up to 50 litres of water, says Miteco, as they contain 4,000 chemical substances.
Cambridge university scientists note that they can have a negative impact on waterways and oceans, causing marine animals to mistake cigarette ends for food.
Miteco’s figures show that of the six billion cigarettes smoked on the planet each year, 4.5 billion end up in natural environments.
According to Cambridge university researchers, evidence suggests that their environmental impact is higher than previously thought, reducing plant growth by 27% due to leaching of nicotine and heavy metals such as lead, nickel and sodium nitrate into soil, and causing microplastic pollution.
“There was little difference in impact between cigarette ends and whole cigarettes, suggesting that the main harmful component is the cellulose acetate fibre in the filter,” they noted in a report.
“This is a type of bioplastic that can take 10-15 years to degrade fully.”
The study further outlines that 10% of smokers do not consider dropping cigarette ends as littering, causing cities such as London to spend £3.8m per year on clean up.
With the launch of the beach tourism season in Spain this Easter, smokers are asked to take their butts away with them; this small gesture will help to reduce pollution along the shore of the Mediterranean and improve living conditions for the fauna and flora in the sea and on the sands.
Recent Comments