Cigarette Butts at the beach. Photo Doc. Awesome Ocean

Eco-Enemy : What’s with Cigarette Butts on the Singapore Shoreline ?

Zahara Sakinah Abdullah
Politics & Economic
International
Jun 22, 2019
2043
When it comes to “marine litter”, plastic straws or bottles would be the first things to appear in mind.

Yet in local waters oftenly, there is one thing strikingly different from the other, pale in comparison to the number of cigarette butts littering the world’s shorelines.

Awareness of single-use plastic waste has been gaining traction in Singapore, most recently with the move by more than 270 food and beverage outlets to eliminate plastic straws. However, the citizens now have to face another new content cigarette butts.

For more than 20 years, Mr N Sivasothi, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Department of Biological Sciences, has been coordinating volunteer clean-ups along Singapore’s waterways and coastlines, including the local segment of global clean-up exercise the International Coastal Cleanup.

The annual event sees volunteers around the world collecting and documenting debris littering their respective countries' shorelines, waterways and beaches. The data is then collated and published by non-profit organisation Ocean Conservancy, which coordinates the International Coastal Cleanup.

Cigarette butts have consistently been among the top items found both locally and
globally, Mr Sivasothi told CNA. Last year 20,915 cigarette butts were found during the International Coastal Cleanup in Singapore. This figure was nearly double the number of straws and stirrers found (10,885) and about 1.6 times the number of plastic beverage bottles (12,594). The butts were second only in numerical terms to litter from foam pieces (which have a higher propensity to break down into hundreds of smaller items).

Mr Sivasoth has consider it a litter. It is also an item which, unlike other types of shoreline litter in Singapore, is more likely to stem from local littering. Although a lot of litter along the country’s shores is washed in from the region, the concentration of cigarette butts along certain public beaches points to their local origin, according to Mr Sivasothi.

However, Mr Sivasothi pointed out that the nature of the annual clean-up - which is normally held on the third Saturday of September - means that it only represents a single snapshot in time, and volunteer efforts across the different clean-up locations across Singapore can vary. However, people would tend to focus on the bigger substance and would likely miss the tinier ones like cigarette butts.

Yet the prevalence of cigarette butts is consistent with the aggregated global International Coastal Cleanup tally, which has consistently seen cigarette butts topping its list of top-10 most-found items every year. In its report for the 2010 International Coastal Cleanup, which marked the exercise's 25th anniversary, Ocean Conservancy released data showing that about 52.9 million cigarettes/cigarette filters had been collected over the past 25 years of clean-ups - making up 32 per cent of total debris items and enough to fill 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The most important fact that we need to know, the large amount of cigarette butt litter as well as the fact that cigarettes contain harmful chemicals that can leach out into the environment were cited as key concerns by the academic. Cigarettes are even consider more harmful than plastics. While plastics substance would float in the water, cigarettes would contaminated the water with its dangerous chemical substance. It is equivalent with the oil that leaks in the wide ocean, but not as much harmful. And as with other types of plastic pollution, cigarette filters can disintegrate and eventually break into microplastics, according to NUS PhD student Amanda Lim, who studies the sources and impact of marine debris.


These chemicals can be deadly to organisms in the environment, with a study published in the BMJ’s Tobacco Control journal finding cigarette butt leachate “acutely toxic” to representative marine and freshwater fish - sometimes at a lethal concentration (LC50) of about one cigarette butt per litre of water for certain types of fish.

One reason for the large amount of cigarette butt litter could come down to its relative lack of visibility, especially on sandy beaches, as compared to larger items such as a plastic bottle or brightly coloured straws.

Another thing to be taken attention, unlike in some other countries which have smoking bans on beaches, smoking is allowed on beaches in Singapore according to the National Environment Agency.

Source: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/single-use-plastic-marine-trash-cigarette-butt-11625024