Important pollution article, 1.7 billion pounds worth

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-cigarette-butts-0618-nujun18,0,5021273.story

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Experts say cigarette butts rank at the very top of litter problems—not just for their ubiquity, but for their toxicity and non-biodegradable nature.

The things stick around in sewers and soil for years, even decades.

Sanitation workers can't clean them up fast enough, and volunteer cleanup crews can only pick up so many, every so often.

"It's about cleanliness," said Chicago Park District superintendent Tim Mitchell. "People have been using North Avenue Beach as an ashtray. By leaving cigarette butts on the beach, that adds to the pollution of the lake, and that's our greatest natural resource."Not that Chicago's streets have it any easier. Walk down a busy stretch of the Loop and it's not unusual to count up hundreds of butts in a blocklong stretch. That butts turn up with such abundance irks Matt Smith, spokesman for the Department of Streets and Sanitation."Smokers tend not to be very courteous with their material disposal," Smith said. "It gets thrown down and we have to sweep it up with our regular street debris. It's an ongoing problem; it's dirty and a remnant of someone's habit."

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Estimates on how long it takes a cigarette butt to turn into a fine powder vary, but the consensus places it at somewhere between 10 and 15 years.

Yet butts don't biodegrade, they only break down.

The distinction is important to environmentalists, who say butts end up as a plastic residue that stays in ecosystems for decades.

A substance that biodegrades, by contrast, is usually organic: plant or animal matter neutralized by enzymes or sunlight.

The bottom line: Old cigarette butts only get diluted or buried. They never truly vanish.A

n estimated 1.7 billion pounds of cigarette butts accumulate in lakes, oceans, on beaches and the rest of the planet annually, according to the New Jersey-based American Littoral Society, a coastal environmental organization.

And to understand the full impact of all those butts, it helps to know what goes into one. The 12,000 strands in a typical filter might resemble cotton, but they're made of something else entirely: a plastic called cellulose acetate, bound to outer paper layers by glue. And because that tiny filter you flick from your fingers is attached to a tobacco product potent enough to earn a Surgeon General's warning, it contains a host of potent chemicals. Among them: carcinogens such as benzopyrene and formaldehyde; poisons such as arsenic, lead, acetone, toluene, cadmium, nicotine and benzene; and hazardous chemicals such as butane and ammonia.If only the dangers stopped there. Butts still containing traces of lit tobacco pose a serious fire hazard; extinguished ones are a threat to marine life and a temptation to toddlers on playgrounds, who tend to put most anything in their mouths.

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I think it has to start sinking in with people that everything they discard, even what they pee into the toilet, is filled with chemicals and toxins that do not naturally "break down."

It is mindboggling that 1.7 BILLION pounds of the toxic components of cigarettes are thrown away and enter the ecosystem where they linger and do not "break down" into "harmless organic" components.

People have to start picking up after themselves, no matter how "small" or "inconvenient" or you are going to small and inconvenient yourselves right off of this planet.