Do Plastic Cigarette Filters Work

(CNN)Plastic straws and numberless accept received widespread attention as pollutants. Merely another, even bigger, plastic problem has been slipping under the radar -- cigarette filters.

Cigarette butts containing plastic filters are the nearly littered particular in the globe.

"Many smokers assume the filters are made of a biodegradable material," says Elizabeth Smith, who works on tobacco control policy at the University of California San Francisco.

In fact, filters are made of cellulose acetate -- a type of plastic that tin have upwards to a decade to decompose.

Cigarette butts collect in drains and are washed into waterways.

But now the European Matrimony is bully downward on this hidden problem. New rules will require the tobacco industry to fund the cleaning upwards of cigarette stubs, every bit office of a broader initiative to reduce single-utilise plastic items.

Cigarette filters are poisoning our environment -- only practise they practice annihilation to help smokers' lungs?

The scale of the problem

Almost six trillion cigarettes are manufactured a year and over 90% of them incorporate plastic filters. That's more than 1 1000000 tonnes of plastic.

Tossing a cigarette butt on the footing is 1 of the about accepted forms of littering, co-ordinate to the World Wellness Organization. Well-nigh two-thirds of butts are dumped irresponsibly -- stubbed out on pavements or dropped into gutters, from where they are carried via storm drains to streams, rivers and oceans.

A seagull in Rome mistakes a cigarette butt for something edible.

Cigarette butts have been the number one item nerveless by the Washington DC-based Ocean Salvation'southward global beach clean-ups every twelvemonth since the initiative started in 1986. Its volunteers accept collected more than 60 1000000 butts.

Nick Mallos, manager of the group'southward Trash Complimentary Seas plan, says that "many of those found on beaches are simply left behind past beachgoers."

A recent study placed fish in water in which cigarette butts had been soaked and removed. After iv days, one-half the fish had died, showing that cigarette butts "seep in into the aquatic environment and are toxic and deadly to living creatures," says Thomas Novotny, emeritus professor of global health at San Diego State Academy, who was involved in the study.

A con?

Plastic filters were invented in the 1950s in response to lung cancer fears.

Tobacco smoke contains about 250 harmful chemicals, including heavy metals, arsenic and polonium-210, a highly radioactive substance that has been used in assassinations. At least 69 of these chemicals are known to cause cancer.

Filters were engineered to reduce lung cancer by blocking toxins.

Scientists test cigarette filters with a smoking machine.

However, by the mid 1960s researchers realized that the tar and nicotine they were trying to filter out were the very substances that made cigarettes satisfying to smokers.

The companies kept the filters, just made them less effective to allow through that hit of nicotine.

Bradford Harris dug deep into tobacco visitor athenaeum while a graduate pupil of history and technology at Stanford University. He writes that tobacco companies decided to proceed the filters as a "marketing tool," while ensuring that smokers still received the crucial nicotine hit. They made claims almost the health benefits of filters that the World Health Organisation calls "fraudulent." CNN contacted the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, which represents a number of major tobacco companies in the Britain, for comment, but did not receive a answer.

An advert for Viceroy cigarettes.

In reality, while filters did cake some toxins, they also made cigarette smoke smoother to inhale and that encouraged smokers to puff more than frequently. Filters also contradistinct the style tobacco burns, actually increasing some toxins in the smoke.

With filtered cigarettes, rates of the most mutual blazon of lung cancer acquired by filterless smoking decreased. But rates of some other type of lung cancer -- adenocarcinoma -- increased.

Chemicals in tobacco smoke cause a range of gruesome diseases.

"The survival rates of the two types of cancer are roughly the same," says David Wilson, a pulmonologist the the University of Pittsburgh Medical Middle, adding that in that location is no persuasive bear witness that filters "have a benign impact on overall lung cancer survival."

In brusque, filters didn't ameliorate smokers' health. But they did worsen our environs.

Pollution solutions

In some cities around the earth, fees are already levied on cigarette packets to fund street cleaning, while in other places, litterbugs are fined.

Mervyn Witherspoon, an proficient in the chemistry of cigarette filters, believes a better solution woudl exist to implement biodegradable filters. He is an advisor to Greenbutts, a company which has adult a filter made of natural materials including flax, hemp and cotton wool.

The Keep Britain Tidy campaign dropped a giant cigarette butt on London's Trafalgar Square to raise awareness.

But Elizabeth Smith, the Us-based tobacco policy skillful, says biodegradable filters still incorporate toxins that could take a long time to degrade. And smokers might feel "permitted" to litter biodegradable filters, she adds, which could brand the problem worse.

In October 2018, the European Parliament backed a radical proposal to oblige EU countries to remove 50% of plastic from cigarette filters by 2025, and 80% past 2030.

Notwithstanding, Eu country representatives subsequently rejected these reduction targets. Instead, tobacco companies will be fabricated responsible for funding awareness-raising campaigns, the provision of public ashtrays and waste material drove, and will have to add together labels to packets of filtered cigarettes, stating that they contain environment-damaging plastic.

Public ash tray at the State Capitol complex in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Meadhbh Bolger, resource justice campaigner at Friends of the Earth, says the new laws are "a significant beginning step" but believes that governments should go beyond these measures and set binding targets.

"We hope that governments will realize that having a planet we can live on is more important than the interests of the tobacco industry."