How Much Damage Does a Cigarette Butt Thrown into the Sea Do to Nature?

Have you ever thought about how much damage a butt you throw into the sea without thinking can do?

There are more than one billion smokers in the world and more than 15 billion cigarettes are bought every day. this number is expected to increase.

Apart from all these harms, cigarette filters have been shown to have effects such as the perception of protection that cigarettes do not completely reduce even people, and less desire to encourage or quit smoking. 12,000 cellulose acetate fibers found in filters can be inhaled directly into the lungs and trigger respiratory diseases.  


Cigarette filters are made from cellulose acetate, a type of plastic that takes several years to degrade in nature. Cigarettes cause 90,000 fires each year in the US alone and are a major cause of wildfires, but the impact of cigarettes on the ocean is even greater.

The discarded cigarette butts are carried to the sewers, from there to the rivers and finally to the sea. Cigarette butts are the most common item of garbage collected from beach cleanups. Cigarette butts represent 845,000 tons of garbage annually worldwide.

Cigarette butts are mistaken for food by fish, seabirds and turtles. It is often found in the stomachs of dead animals washed up on the beach. The chemicals (especially nicotine and ethylphenol) released by butts while floating freely in the water are also toxic to marine life.

The toxins emitted by a single cigarette butt thrown into a liter of water are lethal to small fish and planktonic organisms such as daphnia. The five trillion cigarette butts thrown out each year are enough for all the water in China's Three Gorges Dam (the world's largest dam) to become completely deadly to aquatic life.

Although cigarette manufacturers try to produce filters that are safer for humans and less polluting, they have not yet succeeded in producing a widely accepted filter type in the market.