I’m a bit of a hypocrite. Let’s just get that out of the way. In my defense, I think we all have been hypocrites at some point in our lives.
For clarity’s sake:
Hypocrisy: The practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform.
Maybe there is a better word for it. The prime example for myself is that I am an omnivore. I eat both meat and plants. It is the meat-eating part of me that feels hypocritical. I love animals. I believe they are thinking, feeling, sentient beings. I believe they have a spirit. I believe they have meaning.
And I can’t believe that I eat them, but I do. Ugh.
That is one thing. The other thing comes from an article I recently read. It stated that “cigarette butts” cost the world $26 billion per year in environmental damage.
I smoked once upon a time. And I frequently threw my cigarette butts out of my car window or down on a sidewalk. Dumb me.
While I haven’t done either one for 23 years, I did it a lot for the 22 years prior to that. Stupid me.
But now, thankfully, researchers are calling to ban the sale of plastic cigarette filters.
Yes. Those white cigarette filters, the main component of cigarette butts, are a persistent source of harmful plastic pollution. When people discard them, those filters do not biodegrade.
That would be bad enough. But instead of just lying there, not biodegrading, they gradually release a mixture of hazardous and cancer-causing chemicals into the environment.
And scientists have now conducted a study that has estimated how much this environmental damage costs.
The lead researcher, if you care to know, is a woman named Debora Sy. She is a researcher at the Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control in Thailand.
In her studies, Sy found that plastic in cigarette butts and packaging costs around $26 billion (US dollars) every year or $186 billion every ten years in waste management and ecosystem damage.
During her study, she drew on currently available public data sources for cigarette sales, clean-up costs, and plastic waste on land and sea.
(FYI: Some of the sources include the World Bank, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Tobacco Atlas, a resource for tobacco data.)
I won’t go into all the logistics of the study — the calculations and such. But in the end, $186 billion dollars is a lot of money. However, she made a point of saying that this amount is small compared with the annual economic losses from tobacco ($1.4 trillion per year) and may appear insignificant compared with the 8 million deaths attributable to tobacco each year.
But she also points out that these environmental costs should not be downplayed as these are accumulating and are preventable.
It is just one more thing we could be doing to help the environment. To help the world, I think. So now, I apologize wholeheartedly for every butt I threw down. I truly am sorry. And. I know better now. But I doubt that I’ll ever start smoking again. A double win, I suppose.
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“The environment is everything that isn’t me.” – Albert Einstein
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“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” – Robert Swan
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“In nature, nothing exists alone.” – Rachel Carson
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Butt. Butt. I’m sorry.
