The Great American Smoke Out is the 3rd Thursday every November. This event is meant to help smokers quit. Let me tell you as a non-smoking,
smoker, I find people that nag you to quit are obnoxious. I will also tell you as an ex-smoker, I will never live down the fact that I smoked. I will also tell you even as a smoker, .. I know, because I pick it up on the beach every day, on local streets, in my yard..
Whether you smoke or don’t smoke, it is time to Kick Butt and pick up cigarette litter around your home and the streets at least on November 21.
I just got to Eco Ya
- Tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the US, yet about 43.8 million Americans still smoke cigarettes — Nearly 1 in every 5 adults. As of 2010, there were also 13.2 million cigar smokers in the US, and 2.2 million who smoke tobacco in pipes — other dangerous and addictive forms of tobacco.
- Texas: Each year more than 1 billion pieces of litter will accumulate on Texas highways. Of those, 13 percent are cigarette butts. That means 130 million butts will be tossed out in Texas alone this year.”
- San Francis0: conducted a litter audit that shows that cigarette butts and other cigarette-related packaging account for approximately 25% of all litter. n 2008, the City spent over $24,792,558 in public litter clean up, with cigarette related waste alone amounting to approximately $6,098,969 of the City’s annual litter removal costs. (Source)
- Cigarettes and Fires; According to the American Burn Association, about 900 people in the United States die each year in fires started by cigarettes, and about 2,500 are injured. About 100 of the fire deaths each year are children and nonsmokers. Nationally, annual human and property costs of fires caused by careless smoking total about $6 billion. In 1997, there were more than 130,000 cigarette related fires (Source)
www.cbc.ca - 2011- More than 1 million cigarettes or cigarette butts — enough to fill nearly 58,000 packs — were removed from American beaches and inland waterway on International Coastal Cleanup. Cigarette litter represented about 31 percent of the total debris collected, making it the most-found item as part of those efforts.
- It is estimated that several trillion cigarette butts are littered worldwide every year.
- In fact, cigarettes are the most littered item in America and the world
- Cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate tow, NOT COTTON, and they can take decades to degrade. Not only does cigarette litter ruin even the most picturesque setting, but the toxic residue in cigarette filters is damaging to the environment, and littered butts cause numerous fires every year, some of them fatal.
The good news:
- Cigarettes and Cigarette butts can be recycled through Terracycle.
- Vancouver has started a City-Wide Cigarette butt Recycling program through Terracycle.
- Curtis Baffico, a San Diego stock trader who moonlights as an environmentalist, asked himself these questions and decided to create a recycling system to try to answer them. Baffico raises money on his website, Ripplelife.org, then pays out a “Butt Redemption Value” of $3/pound for whatever cigarette ends people collect and turn in at monthly collection events (Source)
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