Picture it: a creek bed, sometime in the near future. You and a buddy are picking up trash carried by the waters for a community service project. You bend down to pick up a cigarette butt and notice something interesting; poking out of the end of the cigarette is a small plant. A plant? But cigarettes aren’t seeds! What you don’t realize is that in the filter of this cigarette butt are many seeds, planted to help the filter itself degrade better over time. This is the idea proposed by Greenbutts, an organization dedicated to help decrease cigarette pollution. In order to understand Greenbutts, let’s start with the basics. How do cigarettes affect the environment? Are they a problem?
There are over 5 trillion cigarettes smoked annually. From this 5 trillion, about a third will end up in the environment as trash. 1.7 billion pounds, to be exact. In each cigarette, there are over 4,000 chemicals, 50 of which are known carcinogens. One of the deadliest elements of air pollution is particulates, which are also a key component of cigarette smoke. On average, they produce ten times as much air pollution as a diesel car engine. There’s no doubt about it: cigarettes are harmful both to humans and to the environment at large. They continue to be the number one most littered item, and have been found indiscriminately in the stomachs of marine animals, birds, and other various organisms.
Each cigarette contains a portion with tobacco, and a portion with the filter. The filter’s purpose is to keep out the majority of harmful chemicals from reaching the smoker. Thus, when they are discarded in the environment, the most toxic part of a cigarette is able to leach into nature, causing terrible damage. These filters contain a non-biodegradable synthetic plastic, which can take 10-15 years to break down on land. In freshwater, they can take up to 12 months, and in seawater, 5 years.
This is where companies like Greenbutts step in. They have developed an ecofriendly filter made of hemp, flax, and cotton, three natural fibers found in the environment. Thus, when discarded, they will biodegrade much quicker than artificial butts. Further, Green Butts provides paper for rolling your own cigarettes, a healthier alternative to smoking name brand cigarettes.
Another alternative to traditional cigarettes are electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes. Instead of containing tobacco as do regular cigarettes, e-cigarettes contain liquefied nicotine, which is heated and vaporized. These e-cigs can be reused over and over again, a change from traditional cigarettes.
With global temperatures on the rise, companies, organizations, and individuals are doing what they can to decrease anthropogenic causes of greenhouse gases. Electronic cigarettes and Greenbutts are small but important steps in the right direction.
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Image: 9buz.com