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| Photo. ZCO |
A study published by the British Medical Journal concluded that its chemical components are harmful to saltwater and freshwater fish.
Cigarette butts are the most common form of environmental litter in the world, considering that more than 5 billion cigarettes are smoked globally every year.
Cigarette butts account for almost 1/3 of all the rubbish found in beach clean-up collections in northern countries.
It is the chemical components (widely used during tobacco cultivation and cigarette manufacturing), whose residues are frequently found in the final product, that cause the problems.
To demonstrate this, the researchers analysed whether discarded cigarette butts were harmful, through an experiment with a representative sample of fish.
They placed the cigarette butts in diluted mineral water and sea water for 24 hours. The resulting liquid was used to make a kind of broth diluted in six different concentrations, each of which was divided into four, and five fish were introduced into these four. The authors left the fish there for four days.
After analyzing the results, they found that the leachates (contaminated liquids) from the different types of cigarette butts were harmful.
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