Heather, UR- It has been a long cigarette butt filled road... but we made it

 

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Cigarette Butts,

The last form of Acceptable litter

 

 

Cigarette butts are one of the last remaining acceptable forms of litter, accounting for over 32 percent of the litter clean up from the beaches. Every year over 4.5 trillion cigarettes are littered into the environment, a majority of these will make their way into our water sources causing havoc on the marine environment and the organisms that live there. Once a cigarette butt reaches the water it will begin to degrade leaching harmful chemicals and heavy metals into the environment. Many of these toxic substances will accumulate in the sediments and will be inadvertently consumed by sediment dwelling invertebrates and filter feeders that will transport the toxins through the food chain eventually leading to humans. the harmful toxins are not the only issue behind cigarette butt litter, the filter itself is dangerous to marine organisms. the cellulose acetate filter is not biodegradable it is actually photodegradable meaning it can take years for the sun's UV light to break down the filters. Most of the time the filters are mistaken for a food source my a bird or fish before they can degrade causing the organism to either starve to death or choke. There are several companies that are trying to find an alternative to the cellulose acetate filter, like that of Green Butts or Seed Cigs that use natural fibers so that the butt will fully degrade in months rather than years; however these are still in the developmental stages. I wanted to preform an experiment that would test the heavy metal leaching from cigarette butts into the environment. I decided to start out with the basics and just test to see in temperature had an effect on the rate of which the metals would leach, if they leached at all...

My First Experiment:

Tools:

Nylon Gloves

tweezers

distilled water

1.5 gallon tanks

SenSafe water metals test kit

thermometer

camel light cigarette butts

50 watt heaters

tape

sharpie marker

glass jar to store cigarette butts

plastic baggies to hole used test strips

Methods:

 My first experiment was supposed to show the differences between water temperatures in the leaching process of heavy metals out of the cigarette butts. I started out by prepping 7 1.5 gallon tanks by washing them in as little tap water as possible in hope to limit the contaminates contributed to the tanks from the tap water; as well as, rinsing with DI water to remove any residual tap water that may remain. I repeated this process for all 7 of the tanks and let them air dry as I prepared the other tools. I then washed and rinsed with DI water the 7 heaters that I would be using in each of the tanks along with the glass lids that would cover the tanks. I then took the tanks into the black box and using a 1000 ml beaker I proceeded to fill each tank up with 3 liters of distilled water (3000 ml) making sure to use a piece of tape and a sharpie marker to mark the water level to monitor any evaporation that may occur. I then set a heater in each of the tanks but only plugged in the 6 experimental tanks leaving the control unplugged. I set the first three tanks to a temperature that was supposed to measure around 79˚F and the last three tanks set to a degree that should have measured around 85˚F and I labeled each tank using tape and a sharpie marker and made sure to separate the tanks with cardboard to help insulate. I placed three cigarette butts with approximately 1 cm tobacco remaining into each of the 6 experimental tanks leaving the control empty, then I covered each tank and left them to reach temperature overnight. When I arrived the following day I was met with 7 cold tanks, after a frantic mess of checking wires and the power strip I discovered that the power strip itself had been unplugged sometime during my time of absence which leads me to…

ERROR ONE:

Each tank was at room temperature during the first test strip data due to someone unplugging the power strip.

The test strips showed little differences from the control strip leading me to believe that the either was too little concentrations to be shown or none at all. This is what I expected from the first day so I wasn’t too discouraged especially since each tank was left at room temperature. Day ones results were as followed:

Tank	control	Tank 1 A	Tank 2 A	Tank 3 A	Tank 1 B	Tank 2 B	Tank 3 B
Temp ˚F	59	60.8	62.6	62.6	64.4	64.4	66.2
Strip color	yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	yellow

I plugged the power strip back in and left it overnight to hopefully come to temperature again so that I would have better results with my next test. The following day I arrived to warm tanks and pretty decrepit cigarette butts which gave me hope that today I may just see the results that I have been expecting to see. I proceeded to take the temperatures of each of the tanks making sure to stay away from the heaters themselves to not throw off the temperature reading. I was then hit with another road block…

                ERROR 2:

The heaters were not heating the water to the desired temperature so further tampering with the temperature levels were needed.   

  

Again the test strips showed little to no difference from the control strip except for tank 2 B that showed a slight discoloration. As you can imagine I was quite excited to see this color difference but after the next test I think it may have been a piece of tobacco that touched the strip. Day 2’s test strip results were as followed:

Tank	Control	Tank 1 A	Tank 2 A	Tank 3 A	Tank 1 B	Tank 2 B	Tank 3 B
Temp ˚F	59	73.4	73.4	73.4	77	78.8	78.8
Strip color	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow/red	yellow

I decided to turn the three tank B’s up as high as they would go and turn the tank A’s up by “10” degrees then I left the tanks to sit for two days. When I returned two days later for the third test I noted that there was slight evaporation in the heated tanks. This can be an issue because it will concentrate the sample giving readings that would not necessarily represent the original sample. After waiting two days I came back and tested the tanks for the third time receiving results just like the other two test. Day (test) 3’s results were as followed:

Tank	Control	Tank 1 A	Tank 2 A	Tank 3 A	Tank 1 B	Tank 2 B	Tank 3 B
Temp ˚F	59	73.4	75.2	73.4	78.8	78.8	77
Strip color	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	yellow

After receiving all my data I decided to stand back and look at the experiment as a whole… what could be some of the factors in why I wasn’t getting positive results with my test strips? The water had turned an ice tea shade of brown at this point, could there really be no heavy metals in the water? I decided to run one last test on this experiment. I had to clean up the tanks so that another student could use them but I had one more night to try to solve this mystery. I took all the tanks and to the best of my ability I concentrated all six of the tanks into one, making sure I got all tobacco and cigarette but remains into the tank while limiting the water allowed. Was not the most professional experiment but I was desperate, I was just after some form of a result from these test strips. After letting the concentrated tank and the control sit overnight one last time I tested again, and EUREKA! I got the results I was looking for! The two test strips showed a discoloration between the control and the test tank, though they were slight it was still a result in my book and it showed me that all I needed to do was to up my concentrations. This meant running a whole separate experiment where I decided to throw the two different heated temperatures out the window and just do room temp and a heated temperature. 

 

Experiment 2:

Tools: 

500 ml beakers

Nylon Gloves

tweezers

distilled water

SenSafe water metals test kit

camel light cigarette butts

50 watt heaters

tape

sharpie marker

glass jar to store cigarette butts

plastic baggies to hold used test strips 

Methods: 

My second experiment was purely to get some form of results weather it was that no heavy metals were leaching or that my concentrations were just off. I set up the experiment by using 5 500ml beakers, 5 heaters, and distilled water. I put 500 ml distilled water into each of the beakers as well as a heater in each. I came up with the concentration of one cigarette butt per 50 ml distilled water making it a total of ten cigarette butts per beaker. I set up the experiment by having one control that was just distilled water and an unplugged heater, two beakers that had distilled water/ cigarette butts/ and an unplugged heater, and two beakers that had distilled water/ cigarette butts/ and plugged in heaters set at the highest temp. I left these to sit over the holiday break and when I arrived to take my test I was met by a surprise….

ERROR 3:

Water evaporates when there is a heater introduced?! I had to laugh to myself, I was so caught up on getting concentrations down that it didn’t occur to me that the water would be evaporating over those four days. I can in to two beakers almost bone dry with crusted cigarette butts (thank god they didn’t catch fire.)

 Luckily I was able to get a few milliliters of liquid from the samples to run a test on just to see what would happen. The non-heated beakers were able to be tested as well as the control. After testing the control, two non-heated, and one from the heated I was able to get results that do indeed show that there are heavy metals being leached into the water. My next step will be to take the water from the non-heated beakers and run an arsenic test on them to hopefully show that arsenic is one of the heavy metals being leached into the water, I will have those results for the next blog post.