By: Penny McCaslin, Tobacco Program Coordinator –
The Cerro Gordo County Department of Public is recognizing the 45th anniversary of Earth Day by reminding residents to dispose of their cigarette butts properly.
One little cigarette butt here and there amounts to an enormous environmental and public health threat. Did you know at least 1/3 of the more than 300 billion cigarettes smoked annually in the U.S. are tossed into the environment as cigarette butts? The remnant products of cigarettes are toxic, hazardous, and non-biodegradable. This toxic waste can be found on our streets, sidewalks, in our parks, rivers, streams, oceans, and other waterways.
Cigarette butts are the number one littered item along U.S. roadways and on beaches. A single cigarette butt can take 10-15 years before it begins to biodegrade. Even when it begins to break down, it is simply breaking down into particles of plastic, toxic waste. Wildlife and human infants, due to their inability to decipher what is and is not edible, then consume this waste. The result of a child eating a cigarette butt is terrifying for any parent. Children’s symptoms included vomiting, nausea, pale or flushed appearance, and lethargy.
Are you shitting me we have a tobacco program coordinator !!
instead of sitting on your ass complaining
1 get up
2 grab a broom and a dustpan and a gargbage bag
3 pick up the butts
There’s so many of them in the plaza area north of the mall, the city makes the park dept. employees pick them up. The people that hang out at the bars on the plaza should be fined, how pathetic.
Good advice. The damn things just never go away. It seems every smoker who walks by (and there are a lot of them) throws their butts on the ground for someone else to pick up. It is a nasty job picking up butt’s from someone else’s bad habit.