Facts About Litter & Cigarette Butts
City Butt Blitz
Don't Be a Tosser!
Throughout October and November 2004, City streets were on high alert as part of a clean up and enforcement blitz aimed at cigarette butt tossers. Over four days clean up staff collected over 60,000 cigarette butts in locations across the City, Kings Cross and Glebe; butts that could have ended up in Sydney Harbour.
If we do a quick calculation based on this average of 15,000 butts per day, it equals over 5.4 million cigarette butts potentially going into Sydney Harbour every year!
Come on Sydney keep our harbour free of cigarette butts and other litter. Bin Your butts and avoid a $200 fine.
Facts About Litter and Cigarette Butts
The single most common litter item in Australia is the cigarette butt.
Cigarette butts make up half of the litter in NSW. Other common litter includes small pieces of paper, chip and confectionery wrappers, fast food packaging, bottle caps, glass pieces, glass alcohol bottles, plastic straws and soft drink bottles (both plastic and metal).
New sources of litter are becoming increasingly evident as consumer patterns change. An increase in unsolicited advertising material and the introduction of automatic teller machines are examples of activities that now impact on litter.
Lifestyles have also changed. We are busier, snack more and increasingly rely on fast food. This means litter in more places, more often.
Cigarettes - the Big Litter Problem.
- Approximately 7.2 billion cigarettes are discarded in Australia each year. (Ref: 'The Industry': Ref:British American Tobacco Australia 2001 based on AC Nielsen exchange of Sales data)
- This is supported by research from various organisations including Clean Up, Planet Ark and the Butt Littering Trust
- If placed end to end they would extend 144,000 kilometres and circle the planet 3.6 times.
- Cigarette butts make up 50% of litter items in NSW.
- If all the butts in NSW went to landfill this would be approx 13,000 metres cubed of solid waste.
- Cigarette smoke contains up to 4,000 chemicals.
- An estimated 100,000 tonnes of polluted air is exhaled by smokers in NSW each year.
- Cigarette butts take up to five years to break down.
Last Updated: Friday 6 July, 2007
