In doing
research trying to find what chemicals and metals are leaching from cigarette
butts I stumbled upon something interesting. They are called Green Butts and
they are biodegradable cigarette butts!
Apparently these new aged cigarette
butts are made from flax, hemp and cotton with a starch based binder; as well
as, will have no added chemicals. If that doesn’t sound too good to be true,
apparently when these filters are thrown on the ground they will actually grow
grass and flowers too and full biodegrade in two months! Unfortunately Green
Butts are not readily available quite yet, according to their website they are
trying to release them by 2014. While trying to look up more information on the
Green Butts I also found another company called Cigg Seeds which is also
another biodegradable cigarette butt that is infused with wildflower seeds.
All these
ideas are still concepts and have yet to be produced so it leaves me with the
question of how? How are the chemicals that will still be present in the
tobacco be absorbed by the natural filter, and how will the seeds be affected
by the toxins? Will the plant aid in the filtering out of the toxins before
they are leached into the environment?
Some of the
chemicals that I have found to leach out of cigarette butts are cadmium, arsenic,
and lead into the water which have been shown to bioaccumulation in marine
organisms. Cadmium has been shown to cause a malformation of the spine in fish and
increased cadmium in the sediments poses a risk to sediment dwelling organisms
and Arsenic levels have been shown to slow the growth of some marine algae’s as
well as being potentially lethal to organisms. Lead can have the ability to wipe
out entire populations of microorganisms, it affects the nervous system of organisms,
and it is able to accumulate in sediments and plant life. These are some of the
chemicals that I will like to test for when I run my experiment, especially
lead since I will be able to test the sediments, plants, and the water.
Wow--pretty cool that a cigarette butt could produce a plant. Food for thought--just wondering if the plants chosen would certainly not produce an invasive species in a particular area.
ReplyDeleteMy question has to do with the cadmium, arsenic, and lead. What levels are acceptable in the environment, based on EPA standards, and what levels actually produce the impacts that you mentioned in your post?