February 9, 2005
Toxic cigarette butts befoul lagoon, beaches
Litter may harm marine organisms
BY JIM WAYMER
FLORIDA TODAY
Butts roll off smokers' fingers, down roads and drains, some ultimately
ending up in the guts of marine life or buried next to small-fry invertebrates
with a low tolerance for nicotine and other toxins in cigarettes.
Look anywhere, and the butts are there. They pile up at major intersections
along State Road A1A, U.S. 1 and Wickham Road. They're scattered over
parking lots at shopping centers. They line walking paths.
And some think there are even more of them because of bans on smoking
in restaurants, many workplaces and public places.
"It's growing in visibility as more and more people are outdoors
smoking," said Kathleen Register, an adjunct professor of environmental
sciences at Longwood University in Virginia. "I think people are
angry that they need to go out and smoke, so it's almost a defiant act
to litter."
It's the unintended environmental fallout of those defiant acts -- by
some, but not all, of Brevard County's estimated 121,000 smokers --
that has scientists worried.
The cotton-like filters, made of cellulose acetate, take two years or
much longer to break down, seeping thousands of chemicals into groundwater,
the Indian River Lagoon and the beach.
The effect on the marine organisms is poorly understood, especially
at the base of the food chain. The more-visible consequences higher
up the chain are obvious when field biologists witness them. Wildlife
rehabilitators, for example, routinely find cigarette butts in the guts
of dead sea turtles or see them on X-rays of sick turtles.
"I would lump it along with a lot of indigestible items,"
said Blair Witherington, a marine turtle biologist with the Florida
Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
He sees butts floating near the Gulf Stream off Brevard, where he studies
baby sea turtles that feed near floating tufts of Sargassum seaweed.
He doubts the younger turtles can swallow them, but wouldn't put it
past the larger ones.
"They eat just about anything that's novel," Witherington
said.
4,700 chemicals in cigarettes
Butts absorb more than 4,700 chemicals that burnt tobacco emits, including
high concentrations of nicotine and nitrogen. Some biologists suspect
even trace amounts of those chemicals, especially nicotine -- a natural
pesticide -- may have harmful effects at the origins of the food web.
The toxins can accumulate in higher concentrations in larger animals
as they move up the food chain, sometimes with strange effects, though
familiar to smokers. Nicotine, for example, may make tiny invertebrates
such as coquina clams groggy, so they're more apt to become prey for
predators.
"It slows their reaction time," said Angie Ashcraft-Cryder
of Cape Canaveral, a recent graduate from the University of Central
Florida. She studied how fast coquina clams dug into sand near cigarette
butts. The clams, which burrow near the surf line, are important food
for pompano.
Ashcraft-Cryder got the idea for the experiment through volunteering
at beach cleanups at Cocoa Beach Pier, where she once saw cigarette
butts flying out with the sand a ghost crab kicked up as it dug a hole.
In 2000, Kathleen Register of Longwood University conducted an experiment
in which she found toxic chemicals from cigarette butts killed tiny
Daphnia water fleas. One butt per two gallons of water was enough to
be acutely toxic to the freshwater fleas.
"The juice has toxins in it that are deadly to these very small
animals," Register said. "They're very important to the food
chain, so we should care."
Similar fleas in the marine environment also are important fish food.
Shorebirds can be endangered
Butts also can be hazardous to seagulls and other birds that forage
near the dunes.
"I've actually seen shorebirds eat them," said Elizabeth Melvin,
director of the nonprofit Keep Brevard Beautiful's environmental programs.
Cigarettes fall through the cracks in Lori Wilson Park's nature center
main boardwalk, where birds can forage them off the ground.
"That's the hardest stuff to get at," said Doug Stuckey, who
tends to the nature center and often has to pick up the stray butts.
"People aren't actually supposed to smoke on the trail, but they
do all the time. Then I tell them to put it out, and they get all huffy
about it."
As visitors reach the beach at Lori Wilson, a white and blue metal sign
on the boardwalk rail indicates that the Clean Beaches Council, a national
nonprofit group, has designated the beach one of its Bluewave beaches,
an award for cleanliness.
Directly beneath the sign, 13 cigarette butts lie in the sand, within
flicking distance.
Beach is getting trashed
The way smokers toss their spent cigarettes simply maddens Bonnie Chandler
of Melbourne.
"If they want to smoke that's up to them, but they should pick
up after themselves. The beach is just getting trashed," said Chandler,
after a lunchtime stroll at Pelican Beach Park in Satellite Beach.
Butts line the beach lot's eastern edge, about 100 of them sprinkled
within the first 30 paces of a trashcan at the north entrance. Ants
scamper in circular trails around one butt, either dropped or dragged
to the anthill's center.
Butts make up to a third of what's found during Florida beach cleanups.
The Ocean Conservancy's cleanup in 2003 picked up 1.9 million butts
nationwide, 301,244 of them in Florida.
They also typically top the items volunteers with the nonprofit group
pick up, and even more of what citizens report to Keep Brevard Beautiful's
litter hotline.
"I would say it's about 85 percent of what's called in," said
Melvin, director of the group's environmental programs.
Such figures won't change much until the general public looks at litter
prevention as a moral imperative, said Rod Fujita, a marine ecologist
with Environmental Defense, a national nonprofit group.
"We have to be mindful about what we do to the environment,"
Fujita said. "It's way beyond science and it's way beyond policy.
It has to do with moral codes and how we view ourselves with nature."
Or it could be just one more good reason to quit.
"If people were smart enough not to smoke, we wouldn't have a cigarette
butt problem," said Stuckey, who remembers the exact moment he
hung up his butts more 29 years ago.
Chandler, who also kicked her habit years ago, hates to see others'
butts jut up in the sand on Satellite Beach.
"Even when I smoked, I at least found something to put them in,"
she said.
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