SMOKERS appear to be in the firing line again and not only for health issues. According to recent studies, smoking poses a risk to the environment as well as to health.
An e-mail which landed in my inbox this week was from a site called Science Matters, which contained an article from Canadian academic David Suzuki, of the David Suzuki Foundation.
The preamble to Suzuki’s piece in the e-mail stated that cigarette butts pose a serious threat to the environment and called on smokers to stop discarding cigarette filters wherever they please.
Elle of Science Matters quotes the Surfrider Foundation when she writes: “Not only are cigarette butts unsightly, but they also pose long-term threats to our wildlife due to the fact that the filter tips are made of cellulose acetate, a plastic which takes up to 25 years to decompose in nature.
“During this time these butts are likely to be ingested by birds, animals, fish and other wildlife, clogging their digestive systems and, in so doing, cause them to suffer agonizing deaths from starvation.”
Suzuki suggests that it is a lack of education on the dangers that causes smokers to litter. “It’s astounding how many people who would likely not otherwise drop garbage on the ground see nothing wrong with flicking butts without regard for where they land. It may seem trivial, but it’s not.”
The article quotes Surfrider Foundation’s Hold on to your Butt campaign which claims that cigarette butts are the most littered item in the world with 4.95-trillion tossed onto the ground or water every year. A hefty 32 per cent of the litter cleaned up every day in the US are cigarette butts.
While these statistics come from Canada and the United States, it is highly likely that similar stats apply in South Africa.
Anyone who has participated in the annual beach and river clean ups in Pinetown, Durban and surrounds will know that cigarette filters make up a large percentage of the litter collected.
It is not uncommon to see someone flick a cigarette butt out of a moving vehicle, oblivious to the fact that this little bit of litter will join billions like it that are washed into stormwater drains and then into rivers where they form a deadly lure for wildlife.
But flicking cigarettes out of car windows rarely happens in Cape Town because it is against the law to do so. In the fairest Cape, where fires in the fynbos have caused devastation and laid waste to huge tracts of land and threatened homes, this law is primarily for fire prevention.
Now there’s another good reason to stop this horrible habit – the environment.
The best way though would be to stop smoking. It really is a nasty, antisocial habit, and is there any wonder that there are so many cancer cases about when we consider that worldwide we smoke trillions and trillions of cigarettes a year.
