Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash | Hacker News Reader

Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash

nbcnews.com

121 pointsSmkyMt100 comments

My own cognitive bias about smokers littering is why I vote in favor of any cigarette tax. Yes, I realize that not all smokers think the street or sidewalk is an appropriate place for their used cigarette. But the people I see smoking do this, so I (inaccurately) assume they all do (without consequence).

You wouldn't be wrong. My favorite are the smokers who put out their cigarette on a wooden fence and throw it into the desert brush.

Hasn't caught fire yet somehow

Not that surprising. Lumber doesn't catch fire that easily (hence fire starters).

I saw it by my own eyes when I was child. Old wooden fence started to burn after cigarette butt landed at it in hot summer. Wood was dry and hot in direct light. I saw little smoke first then smoke disappeared, then, after couple of minutes, clean fire.

You saw the combustion equivalent of being bit by a shark and struck by lightening at the same time. Except in exceptional circumstances where the wood is highly flammable (like very dry and probably a little bit rotted wood that's at 150F+ from sitting in the sun), something like a cigarette butt or a lit match is not enough to catch lumber on fire without some other easier to ignite material in between as a stepping stone.

You seem to be quite mistaken: https://www.fire.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=327

Your link deals with cigarette butts igniting brush on the roadside and hay in a lab simulating roadside conditions, not lumber. Nobody here is claiming that cigarette butts can't light dry brush on fire. I am claiming that in less than "freak accident" or laboratory conditions it is basically impossible to ignite lumber with a cigarette butt unless there is something (like dry brush) in between.

Edit: Based on the down votes I'm illiterate, I'm wrong or this is Reddit.

Current cigarettes have additives in the paper so that they go out easily themselves.

In the summer time in various forest towns in California, some of which have had major fires recently... I see probably 20 grass fires a year. All of them start next to the road.

I actually think the perpetrators are not that we have 1000 smokers, there are probably just a few REALLY bad people that don't care. They are also the kind of people that if you started to put up signs about smoking and fires, they would start throwing lit matches out the window.

Not that I have any sympathy for smokers, but there are a lot of anthropogenic sources of ignition. Cars dragging metal, and hot catalytic converters are a couple. Electric lines that frequently run along roads are another. And campfires and ordinary cooking fires can spark a wildfire; homeless people tend to live near roads and overpasses.

The fact that we don't have more arsonists in California is one thing that gives me faith in humanity.

The huge California Carr fire was caused by a flat tire ...

https://www.businessinsider.com/california-fire-caused-by-fl...

> [...] The fire was first ignited on July 23, after a trailer's tire blew out and the rim made contact with the pavement, [...]

It seems no one uses their car ashtray anymore, either -- probably because it makes the car stink.

So they hold the cig outside their window, tap the ashes into the street, and often flick the butt into the road. I sometimes wonder how many lit cigs get dropped by accident into the road.

What cars still have ashtrays? I haven't seen one since 1990s models. I have several cars 2002 - 2004 and none of them have an ashtray, or a lighter.

Some car manufacturers sell ash trays as "add-on" items at the dealer since that space can be used more practically for the non-smoking majority.

2018 Mercedes Sprinter, for one. There's a cup holder insert that looks pretty much like an ashtray. 2005 Scion xB has a change holder that's shaped oddly like a thing one could flick ashes into. Came with the cigarette lighter, too.

2011 Nissan Leaf, however, assumes that if you're saving polar bears, you're not a smoker. There is a 12VDC outlet buried in there, but even if you bought a lighter to fit, I wouldn't try to get to it while driving. As far as I recall, there's no place to use as an ash tray.

VW did until around 2010, I think, and then they replaced it with an optional cupholder insert. The 2000's models hid it behind a plain black trap door, so you'd never see it if you didn't go poking around for it.

Wow! You're right -- and they don't come with lighters anymore either, at least not standard ...

I guess cigarettes are also to blame for our lousy 12v outlet design?

I guess cigarettes are also to blame for our lousy 12v outlet design?

Pretty much. There's some business school case study waiting there about network effects, or backcompat, or something. Someone a long time ago needed 12VDC for their new KarDooHickey(tm), but how is the user easily going to get 12V to the device? And here we are.

VWs and BMW motorcycles used/use a Hella plug that is similar to a lighter plug, but was actually designed to be used the way lighter plugs are now. Our '81 VW camper van has one on the dash. Sadly, despite being a better design for the purpose, BMW motorcycles are the only vehicles I now of that still use them. I can run a 75W electric jacket off those plugs, something I would not try with a lighter plug (it might work for a while, but not reliably).

Related fun fact: the 12V outlet in a car can often charge a phone faster than the USB ports. In my experience (2011 Subaru and 2014 Ford) the USB "chargers" can barely charge my iPhone 7 Plus, even using the official Apple charge cable. If I plug into the 12V outlet, it charges much faster — even if I'm simultaneously navigating and have the screen on.

USB 2.0 spec only guarantees 100 mA to be available before active negotiation (which is most likely not enough to do any charging at all), and 500 mA afterwards (which is very slow). For more, you're always relying on non-standard signaling of what the charger is capable of. So, it highly depends on the used charger whether your phone charges fast or not and you can probably easily find 12V chargers that charge slow and USB chargers that charge fast.

No doubt there are some USB ports that charge quickly — my point is that many of them scarcely charge at all. This is pretty dumb, since the whole point of a USB port in a car is to charge a phone or tablet. I would have guessed that they would put in a port that is capable of charging at least as fast as the 12V adaptor, but apparently this is not always true.

I especially like this when I'm riding a motorcycle behind them. Nothing like people casually tossing flaming projectiles at you while you're on your way to work.

Every smoker I have ever known throws their used butts in the street, so I don't think it's inaccurate.

I just thought to myself, I don't do this, but actually, sometimes I do without even thinking about it.

Like, it should be decomposable, if it's cell tissue.

Unfortunately, cellulose acetate does not easily biodegrade. Plus, it's soaked in tar and other toxins.

We have a smokers pole outside for butts. It is surrounded by butts and is apparently only emptied when it catches fire and enters "self cleaning mode" which I'm sure creates a nice miasma of VOC from the burning plastics.

I'm very wary of voting for any sort of social nannying laws that try to keep people from making bad choices, but I make a strong exception for smokers, who seem to be nearly unanimous in treating the world like they treat their lungs.

Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.

Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.

That would make sense if you could meaningfully recycle filters, like you can glass bottles. This would end up being a false economy subsidy more than likely. No thanks.

It will still go some way toward them ending up in the sea.

Why do you need to recycle them? A deposit requires no subsidy- the purchaser pays an extra $0.20 per cig, and recoups that when they return the butts. The accomplished function is the recovery of the butts.

Caveat, all the old butts pre-deposit could probably still get returned for $0.20, which would require some money from somewhere.

And now the shop has a shed load of cigarette butts that they need to get rid of at their own expense, and no extra money to show for it.

Recovery rate of deposit programs is generally not 100%, which leaves the shop with some surplus deposit funds that can be applied towards managing the butts.

That's the thing about regulations: it doesn't matter if the store likes them or not.

That's the thing about a democracy, it's hard to screw over small vocal minorities (which the convenience stores and tobacco companies would be if you tried to screw them over). A minority (such as environmentalists who care strongly enough about this to want a law) can't just rule by decree. The environmentalists would need more resources (resources = money and people who care about the issue) on their side than the convenience stores and tobacco companies have on their side in order to get a law like that passed and in practical terms that usually means getting the apathetic majority to not be apathetic the issue at hand. I see that as being very much an uphill battle in this case since the law is against the self-interest of every smoker who would have to bear the cost at point of sale.

Pursuing biodegradable (in a non-geological timescale) filters is probably a better all around option anyway since even with a deposit not all soda cans make it back, compliance for something like cigarette butts would be far less because of the issues outlined in the article.

Nowhere in the comment you replied to was it suggested that it would be achieved by undemocratic means. Ironically, in your comment you imply that democracy consists of lawmaking by whoever has more money.

I don't think anybody suggested that we should subvert democracy in favor of ruling by decree. I also don't think that the numbers of people and amounts of money on each side of an issue are immutable or are unassailable barriers to progress toward the minority side of the issue.

I can get behind your second paragraph (though it wasn't there originally, which is probably why you got flagged).

Price that into the items. If it's not worthwhile for the store to carry them at the going price, the store is free to raise the price or drop the product. Generally the store is doing some work to sell its products in exchange for making some money. What's the problem?

The idea is to make a pack cost 0.2*num_of_cigs_in_pack more dollars and then when someone returns butts, they can receive that money back. It will not be a subsidy and even if the butts were thrown in the trash afterwards, it would at least lower litter.

I like the idea.. it is tricky to get right though. Cigarette butts smell a lot, so if smokers started carrying around 20 butts in their pack at work/home, non-smokers would not like it. Its hard to imagine modifying a pack cheaply enough to contain the smell.

Would it smell worse than the smell the smoker already carries? I suppose it might, since some smokers are pretty careful not to get the smoke on their clothing. (You can still smell their lungs for like 5-10 minutes afterwards, though.)

(And... sorry to any smokers reading this. Not trying to shame you, but I want to be realistic about whether this would work or not.)

Yes - a lot worse. And, yes, I know that's saying a lot. Another way to put it is that the only time I ever didn't find spent butts to reek was back when I was smoking three packs a day and couldn't smell anything.

Ouch, fair enough.

You can get pocket ashtrays for use when hiking or skiing. I don't smoke so don't know whether they smell or not.

The tax could help reduce the number of butts that are thrown away in wilderness areas too.

In Europe where people get their deposit back for bottles, the homeless (interestingly, not just them, a study in Germany said it also gave bored pensioners something to do) look in trash cans to find bottles to return. I remember reading an experiment where a city (I think in Canada) implemented a trial program to give people 6 cents per cigarette butt: they spent the money marked for the returns quicker than expected because the homeless people collected butts diligently.

It's a bit of a crazy world to make the homeless clean up pollution other people make, but even without this program there are (and will) still be homeless people...

> It's a bit of a crazy world to make the homeless clean up pollution other people make

(Presumably) Refundable deposits don't mandate the homeless do anything. Their desires simply align with the goals of the program.

I'd imagine public ashtrays be pillaged, as they are now to recycle the half smoked tobacco rests. Bad idea.

Who cares if public ashtrays are "pillaged"?

If only we could make air tight containers of some sort.

I agree these would be great. You make them different sizes and stackable! You might even be able to store food in your cigarette smell containers if you made them big enough. Why has no one come up with resealable airtight containers?

I agree, but have to point out that non-smokers not liking disgusting smells has never stopped smokers before.

Pocket ashtrays are a normal part of smoking etiquette in Japan.

Hmmm, cigarette packs that are modified to allow for easy storage? That sounds gross enough to disincentivize any shot at people redeeming deposit funds.

Even more gross: homeless people scrambling for cigarette butts as a side grift. Which, you know, is sure to happen. More profitable than beer and soda cans, and smaller too?

The thing with cans and bottles is that they aren’t absorbant in the same way that cigarette stubs are. People put their mouth on both, but it’s way easier to avoid saliva touching a can or bottle, than a lipstick stained cigarette.

So those packs would have to be water tight, slotted for 20 stubs, and translucent so no one has to open up or guess at how many stubs are inside, for redemption.

Also, redeeming by weight would require standardized tare weights, and approximates for paper/fiberglass mix by volume. Redeeming a ten pound garbage bag, at 20 cents a butt? What’s that worth? Enough to start a street fight?

It could work. But let’s not give tuberculosis another reason to spread.

it's all fun and games until someone figures out they can make cigarette butts and turn them in for money

Wouldn’t be the first time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

considering people aren't making bottles/cans to game beverage container deposit programs, I don't think it's going to be that big of an issue.

One guy [1] manipulated a bottle return machine to get a cash out of some 40,000€. He prevented the machine from shredding the bottle, so he could return it 180,000 times.

[1] (German only) http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/koeln-betrueger-erbeut...

What does the seller do with it, then? There has to be some sort of sequestration program, possibly involving landfills - but a mass of cigarette butts is likely to produce runoff that's toxic to plants and insects, at the very least, if not to everything in its path. So, if you have a multiple-stream recycling program, you probably need to add a stream to that specifically for butts; if you have a single-stream program, I hope your sorters are getting hazard pay already, and if they aren't then they sure should be now. And you still have the sequestration problem from here - all you've accomplished is to make it minimally possible to implement that. And all of this costs, and everything downstream of it will cost, too.

Cheaper and simpler just to ban cigarettes entirely. And I realize that's neither simple nor cheap! But it's not the worst idea I've ever heard, either. Even back when I smoked every day, I wasn't entirely against it; now that I smoke only when drunk, I favor it considerably more. Yeah, it sucks to go cold turkey, but nicotine isn't like ethanol; quitting cold turkey makes you miserable for a while, but it's not going to kill anyone.

A lot of recycling in the US is done with slave labor that already violates workplace safety, so I'm not sure they'd care about adding cigarette butts to single stream programs[1]

[1]http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/doj-iog-unicor-violati...

I think one of the problems with this idea (which I do find really interesting) is that this type of legislation encourages people the smoke more responsibly rather than encourage people not to smoke, which is what most legislation aims to do in regards to cigarettes. Most likely the thing that would be passed would be a $0.20 tax per butt to pay for clean up and incentivize people to stop smoking.

Or try and train birds [0]. Bird feed is cheap.

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/startups/news/a2...

I think it would be even simpler to mandate cigarette filters are biodegradable, made from cotton or something.

That’s not really feasible considering that many filters are made partly from activated carbon in order to filtrate many of the harmful substances that are in cigarettes.

Have you seen the prices people pay on this? They'd throw the money out of the window without second thoughts. They do with deposit cans already.

Butts absolutely stink. No smoker is going yo store 10-20 of them.

I'd rather seem them made biodegradable.

Except it isn't, it's fishing nets

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

that only talks about garbage content in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. maybe cigarette butts have different physical characteristics that causes it to accumulate differently than plastics?

edit: reading the paper further, it looks like they're only surveyed plastics, not any other materials.

From the article:

> The vast majority of the 5.6 trillion cigarettes manufactured worldwide each year come with filters made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can take a decade or more to decompose

Love this project to train crows to pick cigarette butts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368

I had hoped that the vaping trend would mean fewer cigarette butts, but now I'm seeing plastic Juul capsules littered here and there. So much for ecological millennials…

Juul is much more a gen z thing than millenial

I hate that project. It's completely gross to poison crows by training them to do something that we could train humans to do - with the exact same incentive system.

Is there any evidence that the crows are poisoned? Can you provide the source?

I recall reading an article recently about city birds using butts in their nests to ward off insects.

Why would you demand evidence for this?

Cigarette butts will have fully degraded within 15 years. Plastic straws take hundreds of years unless they're flaked off by the sun and then become small plastic bits in the stomachs of fish (still undegraded). It's all bad, but cigarette butts are significantly less worse than plastic.

I read somewhere the other week that fishing gear was the biggest source of ocean trash. Which is it?

Likely due to volume vs pieces.

By volume, I believe fishing nets are the largest polluter, but likely if you counted the pieces, cigarette butts might be higher.

So, which is worse? I think fishing nets by light years, since they are actively designed to harm marine life, and succeed at exactly that.

But people are looking for a means to act, and if they can participate in reduction, in any way, it's good to know that they have a target they can take aim at.

Only commercial fishing is going to ultimately impact fishing nets, and likely only when forced by punitive measures.

That does seem like a faulty metric to identify the worst pollution problems. By pure count there are probably more microbeads than cigarettes in the ocean. So this article is basically saying that of the countable pieces of pollution in the ocean, there are more pieces of cigarette butts than anything else.

I have a hard time trusting reputable news sites when they have this type of sensational reporting.

The article is really about trash on beaches (and pieces vs volume).

Came here to say this. Honestly, the shows over folks. We are truly in the Anthropocene moving to a Blade Runner trash world. We've caught up with end-of-days sci-fi.

If it was the same article I read, it was talking about garbage in the Great Garbage Patch. This article is talking about either the whole ocean or about the garbage that washes up on shore.

On the one hand, cigarettes give you a slow painful death and they are still not universally banned, so there is not much prior reason for hope.

On the other, banning filters seems like a simple enough solution to such a concrete and immediate problem as littering that it might be reasonable to believe an enforce can be implemented despite the track record.

> The vast majority of the 5.6 trillion cigarettes manufactured worldwide each year come with filters made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can take a decade or more to decompose.

Another way of saying this is: they’re moderately biodegradable. It would seem reasonable to give manufacturers a strong incentive to make them even more biodegradable.

(To be clear, I think that smoking in public commercial spaces is seriously problematic, and I think that smokers should find a way to responsibly dispos of their trash or have one forced on them. But it does seem like the degree of blame here is a bit overblown.)

How do all these things end up in the ocean in the first place? Plastic straws or cigarette butts, seems like we have a garbage collection problem.

Rather than banning the item of the day that we find in the ocean, can we fix garbage collection so that none of or crap ends up there?

How is something made of plant matter and paper not biodegradable anyway?

They have plastic inside them.

They are biodegradeable, and do so in under 2 years. It is still littering and lame, however. I stopped asking people at yhe lake, but most ask me what I'm doing after the 1st couple p/u's & I explain I don't come out to look at trash, enough of it in the city. I then offer to share my cup/bottle/pocket to store theirs w/ mine.

Source: Poster on the wall in the Yellowstone NP gift shop.

The cigarette is made of (chemically treated) plant matter and paper, but the filter is not. Its main purpose is to turn brown when heated so the smoker thinks the filter has trapped something bad for them. A "marketing function" as the article says.

If cigarette smoke is blown through a paper tissue it will get stained (dark brown spot)[0]. I don't think paper tissue is treated in order to become brown with cigarette smoke. Perhaps it absorbs something? On the other side, obviously, the cigarette filter (butt) does not seem effective in protecting the lungs from cancer or other smoking generated doseases. From that point of view it has only a "marketing" function.

[0]source: personal experience

"One chemist discovered that if you adjust the pH in cellulose-acetate filters, you can get them to change color during the smoking process, making it look like some really bad stuff is being screened out."

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight-dope/ar...

Or you might prefer this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688990/

Thank you for your references. The second one has little to do with the subject though. The first one confirms that "This did, indeed, block a little tar and toxic gas, but smokers, ever resourceful, responded by changing their behavior—smoking more, taking deeper puffs, etc—thereby making the practical effect of the cellulose-acetate filter approximately nil". This by the way, is what happens in the napkin "experiment" I was referring to. By the way, I just learnt that what I was calling a "filter", it is not a filter, but a mixer.[0]

TL;DR: It's a device whose purpose is to mix the smoke of the cigarette with air which is intaken via the micro holes found on the body of the mixer (a.k.a. "filter). The different air/smoke mix rates give the smoker a different perception of the smoothness / lightness of the cigarette. As a side note, as your first reference mentions, this "filter novelty" may have made things worst as the smoker will make deeper breaths and keep the smoke longer into the lungs when inhaling a more diluted smoke puff.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/07/cigarette...

The second ref was as support that the "filter"s are also bad for you in their own right but provide a "benefit halo" that helps support smoking, just as the tobacco companies intended.

Thank you

My impression is that it's largely from people littering, i.e. _not_ using garbage collection devices in the first place.

Most of the trash comes from Asia ... trash ends up in rivers, then the ocean.

https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-...

https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/where-is-the-plastic-in-th...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/04/explore-...

This makes so much more sense

I never understood the hype with removing plastic straws, at least in America. From personal experience the amount of plastic straw waste is not very big. But they do cause significantly more damage to sea-life than other forms of trash.

Asia on the other hand... that's another story. Especially China. Having been there many times, can confirm people tend to care less about recycling & trash.

I have not been to the Phillipines. The government is not stable though. So it makes sense they are on this list too.

Even considering the cartridges, vaping is much less impactful as far as littering. Even one small juul pod replaces at least a pack worth of butts. With time less wasteful designs can certainly catch on.

How is organic plant material in the ocean, anything but an esthetic problem?

>The cellulose acetate fibers used as the predominant filter material do not readily biodegrade because of the acetyl groups on the cellulose backbone which in itself can quickly be degraded by various microorganisms employing cellulases.[23] A normal life span of a discarded filter is thought to be up to 15 years.[24]

This is a useful question to prompt an important answer and shouldn't have been down voted. Yes the parent should have read the article, but because the parent asked the question everyone else who's just here for the comments will see why cigarette butts aren't just harmless plant material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com