Imagine picking up 57 kilograms of cigarette butts. Considering the average cigarette weighs one gram, that would represent at least 57,000 cigarette butts. Now imagine that all those butts were picked up in a small Northern town of around 1,700 people.
According to a news item on the July 8 edition of CBC's Northbeat program, that is what happened in the Nunavut community of Iglulik when they did a spring cleanup and offered a prize to the people who collected the most garbage and butts. The winner of the contest picked up close to 10 kilograms of stubs.
Now consider this. According to an article on the Internet, cigarette butts are the most-littered item in the world with 4.5 trillion of them discarded into the environment every year. That amounts to 1.69 billion pounds of butts. They make up around 38 per cent of the litter collected each year and 75 per cent of those who smoke admit to throwing butts on the ground or out of moving vehicles, often while they're still burning.
Many might think tossing away cigarette butts is harmless but that's not true. Chemicals from them leach into the environment and those chemicals include arsenic and formaldehyde. Also, the filters are made of made of fibres of cellulose acetate – a form of plastic.
So, while people and companies are getting all excited about plastic straws, most jurisdictions including our own, don’t take cigarette butts as seriously as they should. If we did a massive cleanup of our community, like Iglulik did, how many kilograms of cigarette butts do you think would find?
I don't know but I'm sure it would be a lot. In fact a couple years ago I hiked the Cameron Falls Trail and I must have picked up a couple hundred cigarette butts along the way. What is it with people?
Now I used to be a smoker and for years I carried a pocket ashtray with me because throwing a cigarette butt on the ground is littering, pure and simple. When working in the bush having a pocket ashtray ensured that I wasn't going to start any forest fires. So if a person smokes, carrying a pocket ashtray with them should be mandatory.
In the past year, the Yellowknife Historical Society and I have given out close to 600 pocket ashtrays to people in the community. Hopefully they'll stop a few stubs from ending up on the ground. It is time that people started realizing that throwing butts on the ground is a nasty and sometimes dangerous form of littering. Tossed cigarettes are responsible for starting a number of forest fires, grass fires and house fires every year. Not only do those fires cause a lot of damage, they cost plenty of money to put out.
The cleanup of Iglulik and the number of butts picked up is awesome. It should be a wake-up call to everyone and every community in the North. Imagine if the GNWT ran a contest and gave a substantial prize to the person in each community who picked up the most butts?
It’s not just cigarette butts that bug me. All forms of litter do and the callous way that people do it is especially irksome. Go out to any of the lakes or rivers close to town and you will see pop and beer cans sitting on the bottom, along the portages and at the nicer places to stop and camp. It just boggles my mind that people go out to enjoy the great outdoors and then turn it into one big garbage dump. To add insult to injury a lot of these people are out fishing, and they seem to see nothing wrong with filling the lakes they fish in with empty aluminum cans.
Take a scenic drive on almost any road or highway and just observe the amount of litter you see on a trip. If people count bison and birds, then why shouldn't they count litter? It could be a great game to distract the kids.
“Hey, let’s count the number of pieces of litter we see in the next 50 kilometres and the one who counts the most gets a prize.”
It’s a sad state of affairs when the most common thing you see on a trip, is not the wildlife but the litter.