Around 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded each year, making them one of the most littered items around the world.
Cigarette butts are one of the most littered items globally, with an estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts discarded each year. The Truth Initiative says cigarette butts consistently made up 30%-40% of all litter collected in annual coastal and urban cleanups around the world since the 1980s, not too surprising a figure considering an estimated 65% of smokers litter their cigarette butts.
The large amount of cigarette butt litter has a massive impact on the environment. The cellulose-acetate filters in the butts, while degradable, takes up to 10 years to decompose during which time they pollute rivers, oceans, roads, drains, parks, etc. Environmental advocates believe that cigarette butts also leach toxic chemicals such as arsenic, tar, and heavy metals into the environment, which are poisonous to fish and wildlife and have a negative effect on soil health and plant germination.
Government initiatives to handle cigarette butt litter
This year, France’s government announced that tobacco companies will pay to make sure that cigarette butts are properly disposed of. According to ecology minister Barbara Pompili, cleaning up cigarette butt litter in France costs approximately €100 million annually. An organization will be created to ensure that tobacco companies contribute €80 million to the collection of cigarette butts, the distribution of ashtrays, and communication initiatives so that the cost would not be passed on to consumers through higher cigarette prices.
Across the Channel, the UK government explores options to tackle the issue of littered cigarette butts, one of which was an environmental bill that requires tobacco companies to pay the full disposal costs of tobacco waste products, estimated to be around £40 million (€47.35 million) per year. This measure is in addition to the Litter Strategy for England which says the most effective way to tackle cigarette butt litter is reducing the prevalence of smoking.
The EU’s Directive Against Single-Use Plastics is part of European law since July, restricting the sale and use of 10 single-use plastic items: cotton bud sticks; cutlery, plates, straws and stirrers; balloons and sticks for balloons; food containers; cups for beverages; beverage containers; cigarette butts; plastic bags; packets and wrappers; and wet wipes and sanitary items.
Because there are not yet good alternatives, the directive does not ban cigarette butts but aims to limit their use through measures such as reducing consumption through awareness-raising, requiring la- bels that warn consumers that cigarette butts contain plastics and how to dispose of them correctly, and introducing waste management and clean-up obligations through the Extended Producers Responsibility (EPR) program which means tobacco producers have to pay for cigarette butt cleanups. However, the EPR and other measures addressing single-use plastic items that are not yet fully replaceable like cigarette butts are not enforced yet, expected to come into force in the next few years.
India’s government also drafted its own EPR program, and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) directed the Central Pollution Control Board to develop guidelines for the disposal of cigarette butts
In the US, New York legislators are reviewing a new Tobacco Product Waste Reduction Act that, if passed, would ban filtered cigarettes and single-use e-cigarettes. Maine signed a litter legislation into law in 2018 with “litter” including waste from or associated with tobacco products. California’s SB 424 bill, which would have banned the sales of single-use tobacco products (including cigarette filters) and required manufacturers to have take-back programs as well as pay waste facilities to collect and recycle reusable components, passed the Senate floor but was dropped due to the legislature focusing primarily on Covid-19-related bills.
In Korea, tobacco producers and importers pay a government-imposed KRW24.40 per pack waste- processing fee since 1993. This August, the government launched a pilot project to establish a plan for an efficient management system for the collection, transport, and processing of cigarette butts. It will also explore the option of recycling cigarette butts through heat recovery as well as carry out technological development to promote material recycling through filter separation and pre-processing.
Escaping the landfill
While there are collective efforts from governments, non-profit organizations and activists, as well as private companies and individuals to collect cigarette butt litter, it often seems that less attention is paid to what happens to those collected cigarette butts.
TerraCycle is one answer. The social enterprise works with companies, organizations, and individuals in 21 countries to recycle waste (not just cigarette butts). The TerraCycle Global Foundation was formed in 2018 with a seed grant from the PepsiCo Foundation and was recognized by the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)3 Public Charity in 2019. Headquartered in New Jersey, TerraCycle also operates through an affiliated non-profit in Thailand.
Through TerraCycle’s cigarette waste recycling program, which receives funding from Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, collected cigarette butts are aggregated and stored in TerraCycle’s local warehouse where they are prepared for processing. Residual tobacco and paper are separated out and composted, while the filter is thoroughly cleaned, melted, and pelletized using a method called extrusion. The cellulose acetate powder is then used in the manufacturing of recycled plastic lumber, which can be used to build park benches, picnic tables, fencing, decks, playground equipment, and more.
French company MéGO provides a B2B sorting and recycling service specifically for cigarette butts, working with partners across France. The company has different options for differently-sized businesses, each option providing collection receptacles adapted to the client’s needs, collection of the cigarette butts from the receptacles, recycling them, and a detailed report on the avoided impact and the carbon footprint of the entire operation. Collected cigarette butts are crushed, cleaned, depolluted, dried, and pressed at very high temperatures, turning the material into plastic plates which would then be used to make furniture and other object such as pencil pots, ashtrays, palettes, and more. India’s first cigarette waste management and recycling company, Code Effort, installs its VBins on its clients’ premises to collect cigarette butts. More than seven million collected butts are brought back to Code Effort every month. The collected butts are then delivered to Code Effort’s contractors where they are separated into fiber, paper, and tobacco. The tobacco is given to farms to be composted, while the paper gets grinded and mixed with an organic binder, then made into mosquito repellant sheets. The fiber is also grinded then soaked in a stabilizing chemical mixture developed by Code Effort for 24 hours, leaving them looking like cotton. Then, the fiber goes through a final process to make it soft before being used to stuff toys, cushions, and keychains. Code Effort products are packaged and sold online or in local shops.
Recycled cigarette butts can also be made into bricks, as RMIT University researchers have shown. Led by Associate Professor Abbas Mohajerani, the team manufactured and tested fired clay bricks with 2.5%, 5%, 7.5%, and 10% cigarette butt content by weight compared against control bricks with no cigarette butts. They found that using recycled cigarette butts to make bricks is a viable solution that produces a masonry construction material that can be either loadbearing or non-loadbearing, depending on the quantity of cigarette butts incorporated. They also found that bricks containing as little as 1% cigarette butt content would still provide a solution for cigarette butt recycling while maintaining properties very similar to those of a non-butt brick. And by their calculations, theoretically, only 2.5% of the world’s annual brick production is necessary to completely offset the worldwide, annual cigarette production.