Ashes to Ashes?

In early July I sat down to write a post about cigarettes and filter waste. What I had discovered... well, it woke me up. The scale of the pollution, the number of toxins, the proof that cigarettes kill marine life. I decided that I needed to learn more.

This summer I learned:

• That cigarette butts litter my lovely beach (and every public space I walk through).
• That the big "Tobacco-Free Area" sign on the lifeguard station did nothing to slow the weekly deluge.
• That a small, quiet beach in southern Maine can collect almost 2,000 filters in the course of the summer.
• And that filters really do wash up onto the beach from the ocean. I've seen it.

It's the last point that gets me. All those butts you see in the gutter, they go into the storm drains. Then to a nearby river or stream. Then to the ocean.

Think I'm wrong, and that they break down? Let's try a little experiment. Let's fill a 5-gallon bucket with water (fresh water, representing your local storm drain/river). Let's put some sand, wood, and a rock in it to simulate nature. Then let's drop a freshly-found cigarette butt into it. Every day or so let's swirl the cigarette around 25 times to simulate the churning it goes through in the "wild."

Day 1 - August 28, 2010

Give it a couple days.

Day 3

Give it another day, and something unexpected happens.

Day 4

Look at that! After 3 days it mysteriously sinks. But it's easily picked up by even gentle swirls of water. Like, say, a stream slowly meandering down to the ocean. Let's keep rolling.

Day 9

Still intact.

Day 14

Still intact.

Day 24

Still intact. And then finally to the latest picture from a day ago:

Day 35... and counting

So, it's more than a month in now. The paper's a little scraped. But the filter is still completely intact and unchanged. It does sink in a foot of fresh water, but it also moves very easily when any current is applied. After my experiment reaches two months, I'll switch to a bucket of saltwater to represent it emptying into the ocean. I'll swirl it more frequently to represent tides and waves. And we'll just keep going. How long do you think it'll be before it breaks down?

Here's another fun one. What happens if you subject a cigarette butt to a washing machine on normal cycle and then a dryer for an hour on medium heat? Not much.

Looks like.... a cigarette butt

5.5 trillion cigarettes are manufactured every year. Best studies suggest that only 10% make it properly into an ashtray or receptacle. But let's be generous. Let's say 90% make it. That still leaves 550 billion -- 550,000,000,000 -- littered. Every year. And they don't go away. They don't go away. Because they're plastic -- cellulose acetate. They will last for years. And even when they do finally dissolve to a powder that you can't see, they're still plastic. 

The tobacco industry is in no hurry to tell consumers that filters are plastic. Why? They found that smokers tend to ritualize the act of stubbing out a butt at the end of their cigarette (see p. 6 of the PDF file in the link). Most smokers simply don't think their actions are so far-reaching. What would it do to the industry's bottom line if smokers knew that most or all of the butts they've ever discarded onto the ground still exist?

Not In My Back Yard, or "Who Cares, Part II"

You may recall a "lucky" encounter I had with rock snot a month ago. It set the stage for talking about why this all matters. Litter at the beach, trash bobbing in the ocean -- so what? Why should someone care?

As it happens, the deeper I dig, the more reasons I find to care.

"Who Cares, Part I" dealt with plastics as a carrier of invasive life forms that can devastate distant and isolated ecosystems. But that's just it -- too often it seems that marine debris is a problem "over there," somehow other, distant, unrelated to our day-to-day lives.

It's not. That's just a different strain of "NIMBY"ism. Instead of I don't want that so close to me, it's There's no way that's so close to me.

I get it. I mean, it's easy to see pictures from Indonesia or India and think that floating garbage is only a scourge of the developing world. It's a bit harder when you see it in:

Gutters in New York
(http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/natural-beauty-fashion/
blogs/in-new-york-trash-is-art#)

A quick test-dredge of the Charles River, Boston
(http://www.rozaliaproject.org/gallery.html)

Rivers in Missouri
(http://nocostl.com/2010/03/help-keep-our-rivers-clean-at-
confluence-trash-bash-2010/)

Baltimore Harbor
(http://www.bottlebill.org/about/benefits/litter/2007-MD-baltimore.htm)

Beaches in San Diego
(http://www.greenecoservices.com/reliving-the-beach-life-take-care-of-our-oceans/)

Sea floors off of Santa Barbara, CA
(http://news.discovery.com/earth/deep-ocean-garbage-dumps.html)

Seabird bellies on the paradise of Midway
(http://conservationreport.com/2008/03/22/synthetic-sea-no-trash-doesnt-magically-
disappear-just-like-barrels-of-oil-dont-magically-grow-on-trees/

The industrialized world -- our world -- is awash in persistent waste. It all wants to get to the ocean. The bits that don't make it all the way instead foul our rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, swimming holes, fishing holes, reservoirs, hatcheries, town docks, riverwalks, landscapes. The bits that do make it swirl in gyres and eddys for years, or decades, until finding their way into marine life or back onto our shores.

There may be places where you can still walk the beach and overlook it or pretend not to see it. But as I've found, it's there. More of it washes up each week. And it's only getting worse.

There is no technology for pulling plastic out of lake, river, or sea without destroying the ecosystem. You can't filter plastic -- especially the little photodegraded microplastics -- from plankton. If you pull up the plankton, you remove the base of the food web, and you kill the sea. What's swirling out there, and washing up, is going to keep doing it. In our lifetime, and our children's, and their children's.

"Not In My Back Yard"? Check again.