Heather, UR- No Butts About It

After the discussion that I had with Mrs. Woodall today I have decided to concentrate my research into one source of pollutant and possibly one specific region that is being affected (plant life, organisms, water quality, or sediment.) We both agreed that an interesting pollutant to study would be cigarette butts since, as we all know, they are a popular pollutant and are found in abundance in every ecosystem (unfortunately). I have found a blog post “52.9 Million Cigarette Butts on the Beach” on the NOAA Response and Restoration Blog and it describes the amount of cigarette butts collected over the past 25 years during the annual International Coastal Cleanup Events. Cigarettes make up 32 percent of the total debris cleaned up during these events.

 

 Let’s break the cigarette down into its components and see where the possible hazards to the environment are located. The cigarette filters consist of a non-biodegradable plastic called cellulose acetate. Not only is this plastic going to remain in the ecosystem for an extremely long time but it is also a hazard to the local wild life. Local wild life like fish and birds will confuse this for food and they may choke or (which I never knew this) they will starve to death because the plastic is not digestible and it will fill up the organism’s stomach.

The cigarette butt contain toxins that have been documented to affect the health of fish. In a test done by public health non-profit Legacy® they found that a single cigarette butt soaking in one liter of water would kill half of the fish exposed to it. Now let’s slow down and think about this, if the volunteers found 52.9 million cigarette butts in the past 25 years (let’s just say that every year the number of butts was equal) that would mean that they found 2,116,000 butts a year! Imagine if all of those butts made it into a water source that had little flow or drainage the concentrations of these toxins would potentially destroy the fish population.

As an experiment I would like to take a cigarette butt and put it into one liter of distilled water to test exactly how much of the chemicals leach in given amounts of time. I would be interested to see if there is a final concentration where all the data will eventually plateau, or maybe will the data decrease through toxin being emitted out through evaporation? Then I would like to run an experiment where I introduce and organism (possibly a sea grass) to see if the concentrations decrease. If they do decrease then I’d want to test the organisms to see if they have been contaminated with the toxins. There are many ways that I can go about this research but now that I have it down to the one pollutant it will be easier to limit my variables and hopefully have more precise data.