Do These Butts Make My State Look Bad?
ORANGE —
We've stopped chucking batteries into the garbage and pouring motor oil down the drain. We recycle cardboard boxes, plastic jugs and electronics — some of us even pick up after our dogs.
Now, what do we do about the one billion cigarette butts thrown away each day in the United States as litter? Not just an eyesore, they contain a witch's brew of chemicals — arsenic vinyl chloride, acetone, mercury, lead, hydrogen cyanide - that leach into soil and streams.
Take a stroll in any Connecticut town, any state park, any beach and count the cigarette butts. Dizzy?
Now, meet fifteen-year-old Daniel Kruger of Orange, a member of the "No Butts About It" litter campaign. The volunteer brigade, made up of Kruger, his cousins David, Allie and Amy Steinmetz and other family members, is trying to rid Connecticut of cigarette butts, the most littered item in the state — in the United States.
"We're a much more environmentally aware country than we were in the past," said Cheryl Healton, president and chief executive of Legacy, a nonprofit public health group, based in Washington D.C.
But when it comes to cigarettes butts we're in a haze.
Each second, 142 cigarette butts are flicked out of car windows, tossed onto the grass or stubbed out on the sidewalk, Healton said. Nationwide, that adds up to an estimated 176 million pounds worth of cigarette litter each year.
"Frequently, the people doing this are unaware that what they are throwing out is a toxic substance that can take decades to degrade," said Healton. "This is a new issue for us. We're trying to raise awareness of this issue."
About 95 percent of cigarette filters are composed of cellulose acetate, "a form of plastic which does not easily degrade," according to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Dispersed into waterways through storm drains, their toxic chemicals can harm fish and other stream dwellers, according to The Ocean Conservancy.
Animals mistake them for food. Cigarette butts and filters have been found in the stomachs of birds, wildlife, marine mammals and fish. Children pick them up and ingest them, sending nearly 1,000 to the hospital each year.
"In Connecticut more than 2.5 billion cigarettes [129 million packs] were sold last year. Careless disposal of those butts adds toxic trash to the state each and every day," Healton said.
No Butts About It
In 2009, Kruger and his cousin David Steinmetz, now 20, launched the "No Butts About It" campaign to clean up cigarette litter and raise awareness about its hazards. For their efforts, they received a 2011 GreenCircle award from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The department gives out between 25 and 30 awards each year.
Working with the Connecticut Cigarette Litter Prevention program and Keep America Beautiful, "they have conducted preliminary and secondary 'scans' [ cigarette counts] at state parks, beaches and in the towns of Woodbridge and Orange," said Dwayne Gardner, DEEP spokesman.
Steinmetz began picking up cigarette litter when he and his sisters were young; Kruger joined in when he turned 13.
"For my Bar Mitzvah, I needed to do a good community thing," said Kruger, a ninth-grader at Amity High School in Woodbridge. "We — me, my cousin and my aunt — went to Hammonasset State Park and did a preliminary count. At one picnic pavilion there were over 1,000 butts."
That's nearly one-pound of cigarette litter, according to Butt Redemption Value, a San Diego program that pays $3 per pound of cigarette butts.
Near a bike rack at Hammonasset, Kruger counted and collected more than 300 butts. "Those plastic filters can take 25 years to disintegrate. State parks are supposed to be beautiful places for everyone," Kruger said.
After receiving permission from local officials, the group put up posters they'd designed: a hand-drawn rendering of the earth that shows four cigarette butts protruding from the top of the globe that's encircled by the words, "The Earth is Not Your Ashtray. Keep Our Earth Clean!"
They also persuaded park officials to boost the number of ashtrays and receptacles.
"Six months later we went back to the pavilion and instead of 1,000 there were 300 cigarette butts," said Kruger, who wears disposable latex gloves when picking up litter.
In Woodbridge, the group conducted a preliminary count, and then asked local officials and business owners to hang a few posters and add a few trash receptacles.
When they returned a few months later, they saw a similar decrease in cigarette litter, Kruger said.
"Most of the areas we scanned — some parks and picnic areas and around restaurants — had about 300 to 500 cigarette butts. When we came back there were around 100. That was really impressive."
No More Butts
In a perfect world, no one would smoke.
In Connecticut an estimated 17 percent of adults — 450,000 — smoke; another 33,000 middle and high school students light up.
Brrrrrrr! No more freezing my butt and fingers off!
Brrrrrrr! No more freezing my butt and fingers off!
No more freezing my butt off :)
