What do you picture in your mind when I say the words ‘severe littering’?

I bet that most of you will have thought of piles of plastic bottles, plastic bags and dumping sites. The reality is, and this might come as a surprise to some, that the worst litter is not the big pieces. It sadly is the smallest items, which also are the hardest to clean up, that are the most harmful for our environment.

Overall in society we seem to think that small things or issues are nothing we should pay attention to, and we should go after the big ones instead. What we miss is the fact that small bad habits occurring often will, in the long run, cause a big issue.  Not when looked at individually, but when seeing the total effect.

Sometimes we have an issue but have a hard time solving it because we don’t easily see what is causing it. The reason is that it’s not caused by the big visible things, but rather by the small ones that no one pays attention to. Be it a traffic issue due to people not using indicators or following traffic rules, where ministers think that widening the roads is the proper solution, or contaminated water due to chemicals from cigarette butts.

According to the European Health Interview Survey carried out in 2014/2015, 20.1% of the population are daily smokers in Malta. It is very common for people think that cigarette butts, the filters in particular, are biodegradable and made out of cotton. The truth is very far from that, I’m afraid. 98% of the filter is actually made up of plastic fibres (cellulose acetate). The plastic fibres do not biodegrade but can indeed degrade within 10-20 years. Don’t jump to conclusions now that the word degrade is a good one, because it is actually the opposite. The word degrade has been misused by the industries to make people think that the products are environment friendly. Don’t be fooled.

When an item degrades, it simply means that it breaks down into smaller pieces of waste which then dilute into the soil or water. There is no “away” when it comes to plastic. Every single piece of plastic ever created is still here, no exceptions, in smaller shapes due to degradation or in the shape of other items due to recycling. Nothing goes away, ever. Our earth is a closed system hence I am always surprised that leaders don’t go all in for reducing, but instead choose the easy way out many times.

It is said that 75% of the smokers normally dispose of the cigarette butts in the environment - ‘It’s just a small piece and it will biodegrade so what’s the issue?’.

In Malta, 20% daily smokers means 86 000 smokers. Let’s say that they smoke one pack each - that would add up to 1,720,000 cigarette butts - every day.

If just half of these ended up in the environment, we are looking at 860 000 cigarette butts incorrectly disposed of daily, and 314,000,000 each year. Let that number sink in for a while.

Now, we really can’t say that it’s a small issue any more, can we?

The three main issues with cigarette butts are that they are small (hard to clean up), toxic (one cigarette contains 600 chemicals and release thousands of chemicals when lit) and they are incorrectly disposed of in a massive amount worldwide. When carried away with rain or when disposed of in the sea, one single cigarette butt can contaminate up to 50 litres of water. It’s estimated that millions of sea wildlife are killed caused by these toxins.

Cigarette butts are by far the most littered item on earth, 4.5 trillion butts are littered world wide. It’s interesting how humans, who see themselves as superiors, don’t realise the impact this amount has on others. Not only on other humans, because it looks horrible, but also on the marine life and animal life on land. The chemicals in cigarettes (arsenic and formaldehyde amongst others) are known to be bad for human health, do we somehow think of it as less bad for the animals?

How come we lost the understanding that everything we do have an impact on others? How come we no longer pause and admire the miracles in front of our eyes? Are we taking life and what’s in it for granted? The environment is not what it was because of us. On the contrary - we are what we are because of the environment. We aren’t saving the environment, we are saving ourselves.

So be responsible, put the butt where it belongs - the environment is not an ashtray.