Smoked cigarette butts: Unignorable source for environmental microplastic fibers
Graphical abstract
Section snippets
Problems of microplastics and cigarette butts
Microplastic pollution has been becoming one of the focuses of attention all over the world, because this environmental issue is making sustainability more and more complicated. With the increasing attention of marine microplastics, how to control the daily life garbage into the environment has been concerned. Although how to quantify marine plastics and microplastics is still a great challenge, researchers have estimate that about 4.8–12.7 million tons of plastic waste flow into the ocean
Smoked cigarette butts as an un-ignorable source for microplastic fibers
Cigarette butts are usually made of cellulose acetate plastic, and one filter is usually consists of 15,000 strands of fibers (Novotny et al., 2009). Most people misunderstand the composition of the cigarette filter, and many smokers believe it is biodegradable in the natural environment. However, this is not the case. Additives and suitable degradation conditions can accelerate the decomposition and subsequent further degradation of cigarette butts. Unfortunately, nevertheless, the complete
Impact of microplastic fibers and pollutants released from smoked cigarette filters on organisms
Leachate is often used to study the potential threat of cigarette butts to aquatic organisms and the environment, and almost all studies on the toxicity of butts to living species have reported negative effects (Rebelein et al., 2021; Wright et al., 2015). Evidence has shown that a single smoked cigarette butt can leach enough pollutants to pollute about 1000 L of water (Green et al., 2014), which is enough to show the harm of cigarette butt to the environment. Booth et al. (2015) had studied
Ways forward
Cigarette butts as an easily neglected source of environmental microplastic fibers seems obvious. Unfortunately, the public pay few attentions to these microplastic fibers, so greater public education and awareness is the necessary step. Throwing cigarette butts in life is just as an example of littering. There are a large number of microplastic fibers in the global seafloor (Woodall et al., 2014), and the microplastic fibers from cigarette butts may account for a large proportion of these
Declaration of competing interest
The authors have no conflict of interest to declare regarding this article.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the financial supports from National Natural Science Foundation of China (U20A20323, 51521006, 51579095 and 51378190).
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These authors contribute equally to this article.