Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 16, 2010
Littered cigarette butts pose environmental threat, UTC research says
David Laprad
Dr. Gretchen Potts, an associate professor at UTC, recently spearheaded a project in which three undergraduate students worked to identify and quantify the toxic pollutants in cigarette butts, with the goal of assessing the impact littered cigarettes have on the environment.
- David Laprad
Dr. Gretchen Potts doesn’t smoke, so when she buys cigarettes for a scientific study on the pollutants in littered cigarette butts, she feels compelled to explain herself to the cashier.
With smokers worldwide tossing more than 4.5 trillion butts a year, however, there are greater things at risk than her reputation: discarded butts pose dangers to the environment as well, according to a study Potts is overseeing in the chemistry department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Under the guidance of Associate Professor Potts, three undergraduate students have worked to identify and quantify the components in cigarette butts, with the goal of assessing the impact littered cigarettes have on the environment. Their conclusion: each discarded butt can introduce a substantial number of toxic pollutants to its surroundings.
“The purpose of a cigarette filter is to keep the really nasty stuff from getting into your body. So when someone tosses a cigarette butt out his car window, he’s throwing all of that into the environment,” Potts says.
According to a May 2009 New York Times article titled “Cigarette Butts: The Tiny Trash That Piles Up,” a lot of people in the U.S. are tossing their butts. The Cigarette Litter Prevention Program, launched by Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit group financed by cigarette maker Phillip Morris, suggests butts account for as much as 33 percent of all litter nationwide, the Times said.
For many environmentalists, the real problem isn’t the litter, but the degree to which it can damage exposed organisms. Many discarded butts end up in storm drains and municipal waters systems, where they leach toxins, said Legal Planet, an environmental law and policy blog, in a May 2009 article titled “No Butts About It.”
One of the participants in the UTC study, Jessica Moerman, now a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology, worked to identify the metals cigarette butts contain.
According to her thesis, titled “Not Just an Eyesore: Analysis of Metals Leached from Smoked Cigarette Litter,” this was the first research of its kind, as no other published research on the topic exists. Through her work, Moerman sought to
determine the concentration of 12 selected metals extracted from cigarette butts using sophisticated scientific instruments. Lead and cadmium are just two of the metals for which butts serve as a repository.
In the end, Moerman concluded, “although a single piece of cigarette litter may not pose much harm, the cumulative effect of tens to hundreds of cigarettes would likely be devastating to local (organisms).”
Potts says the presence of metals in cigarette butts isn’t surprising, due to the manner in which tobacco is grown and the materials manufacturers
add to them. What might raise eyebrows, however, is that
some of the concentrations of metals Moerman found exceeded Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards.
Flicked out of car windows, tossed behind bushes and crushed underfoot on sidewalks around the world, cigarette butts also contain thousands of organic compounds. A second student involved in the study, Daniel Burriss, who will begin working toward his doctoral degree at the University of Kentucky this fall, indentified some of these through his portion of the project. In addition to nicotine and menthol, Burriss identified compounds normally found in rancid butter and foot odor, among others.
Of the 15 compounds he verified, nicotine is known to be harmful to aquatic environments. Another emits toxic vapors when heated.
Most smokers assume the butts they toss decompose rapidly, but that’s not the case, Potts says. In fact, cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that’s non-biodegradable.
“People don’t understand what they’re doing when they throw a cigarette butt out their car window,” Potts says. “They think butts are biodegradable, but they can persist in the environment as individual point sources for pollution for up to 18 months.”
A third student, Matthew Stephens, took on the task of quantifying how much of certain compounds could be found in a typical cigarette butt.
Potts says she obtained the idea for the project from an article in Chemical and Engineering News in which the editor asked if anyone had ever thought about the number of discarded cigarette butts and measured what they contained.
“When I read that, I started looking at the literature out there, and found that no one had done any research on it. So, we decided to start identifying and quantifying what’s there,” she says.
The chemistry department at UTC is uniquely equipped to handle the research involved in the cigarette butt project, as it owns a number of complex scientific instruments. Included among the devices is a GC-MS, which consists of a gas chromatograph and a mass spectrometer working together to identify and measure substances within a sample.
The GC-MS is featured on the television show, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” although the unit at UTC doesn’t automatically identify the compounds, as the one on TV does. Rather, the students participating in the research had to figure out what their samples contained on their own using the skills and knowledge they’d acquired at UTC.
“We have one of the best undergraduate programs in the state, if not the entire Southeast. We graduate a lot of students, and send a lot of our students to graduate school,” Potts says.
The cigarette butt study at UTC is not intended to be an indictment of smokers, Potts says. Moerman even writes in her thesis that laws meant to protect people from secondhand smoke have forced cigarette users outside. The Times article goes one step further, quoting smokers as saying there aren’t enough proper receptacles outside for their butts. Not only that, but they’re reluctant to throw burning objects in regular trash bins.
Once the results of the UTC project are made public, however, they could serve as a catalyst for change. Potts is currently arranging for a prestigious science journal to publish Moerman’s thesis, giving the world its first set of empirical facts on the subject. In the meantime, she’ll continue to be thankful her days of buying cigarettes in bulk are over.
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