Please don't be a Butt-Head
Cigarette butts are the most prevalent form of plastic litter. Some 4.5 TRILLION pollute our waterways and streets every single year. That is 12,328,767,123 EVERY DAY.
Do you know what cigarette butts look like once they’re in the sea? FOOD. At least for our marine wildlife. Butts are found in autopsies of dolphins, seabirds. turtles, just to start the list. We don’t actually know how sea turtles can navigate such long distances so precisely, or their average life expectancy - those guys can get to be very, VERY old.
Unless they succumb to cigarette butts.
Please encourage smokers in your life to carry portable ashtrays, we have tins.
Use pickers or gloves to pick up butts when you can.
Get some chalk and - provided it’s safe to do so - draw sea life and messages around drains to remind folk where litter goes.
And if the chance arises, borrow Cyril the cigarette butt costume from Keep Scotland Beautiful
See our videos of being out in Haddington, and read below for some other cig facts, solutions and the campaign to ban plastic filters in Scotland.
The Marine Conservation Society, along with Keep Scotland Beautiful and health organisation ASH Scotland have called on the Scottish Government to ban plastic filters from butts:
The US State of California has a Bill ready for its third reading prohibiting the sale of any single-use filters or plastic devices linked with smoking and to require manufacturers of such components to use materials eligible for local recycling or to offer return and reuse programs.6 We would welcome similar legislative ambition from the Scottish Government to tackle this by firstly banning plastic based single-use filters and then reviewing the need for other single- use filters further. We believe that single-use plastic cigarette filters should be categorised alongside other single-use plastics, like plastic cotton-bud stems, straws and cups as optional consumer choices, and be the subject of appropriate regulatory action.
https://www.mcsuk.org/news/ban-single-use-plastic-cigarette-filters/
The lovely Leigh is a smoker and hasn’t littered a butt in over a decade. She carries her own portable ashtray after being fined £90 she didn’t really have as a teenager travelling in Germany. Was it the fine or the knowledge of environmental impact that stopped her? “The £90, definitely!” Shows the impact of regulation and government action. Let’s pincer it by encouraging positive individual action WITH government action too (or lobbying for it, if we want to frame it as something we can control.)
Lil’s Lou with one of Haddington’s most prolific litter pickers, Louise from Rotary and Haddington in Bloom. No jokes about French cities please…
At the Farmers Market we heard about the Swedish city training its crows to pick up cigarette butts. It’s a novel idea - the corvids are reputed to have the reasoning of a seven year old child and therefore the best for the job. But it does make me sad that we need to train - and risk the health of - birds when we as humans could PUT THEM IN THE BIN IN THE FIRST PLACE.