A litter prevention project has been a success, say Byron Shire Council staff, with 1,450 pieces of litter being prevented from flowing into the Cape Byron Marine Park over a two month period.
In a media release last week, Council staff say, ‘The Source to Sea – Keep Byron Shire Litter-free project has allowed for the installation of 24 litter baskets in drains in Byron Bay’.
They say the project was funded by a $50,000 grant from the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA).
Zoe White, Council’s Waste Education and Compliance Officer said, ‘The first audit revealed 5.1kg of rubbish was collected in the baskets, with 60 per cent of items made of plastic including cigarette butts, cutlery, straws and small sushi soy sauce “fish” bottles’.
Leaching toxic chemicals into waterways
‘Cigarette butts, which are made of plastic and leach toxic chemicals into waterways, were the most numerous item’, Ms White said.
The baskets in the drains are designed to trap any litter and organic matter from the street that enters the stormwater drains without impeding the regular flow of water.
Almost 91kg of organic matter was also collected, Ms White said.
North East Waste and Positive Change for Marine Life helped Council with the first waste audit. Volunteers who would like to be involved with this project and upcoming audits can email: [email protected].
Cigarette butts aren’t made of plastic, that would melt. They are made of glass, similar to a pink bat. Goes to show how little plastic ends up in the ocean from western countries. The majority of ocean plastic comes from recycling bins. Most can’t be recycled cost effectively in the west, and gets sent to third-world countries to be recycled. They have a tendency to dump it in the ocean instead. That is why we banned outsourcing recycling from Australian, but the US and Europe still do it. Most feel good green policies end up damaging the environment in practice.
Cigarette butts are made from non-biodegradable plastic and can take up to 12-15 years to break down.
Cellulose acetate fiber, one of the earliest synthetic fibers, is based on cotton or tree pulp cellulose (“biopolymers”). These “cellulosic fibers” have been replaced in many applications by cheaper petro-based fibers (nylon and polyester) in recent decades.
Well there you go. Good to know. Only 15 years. That’s pretty fast.
Melting point of Cellulose Acetate fibre is 220C
Temperatures in burning cigarettes range from about 400 °C between puffs to about 900 °C during a puff.
Research update: Apparently, back in the day, there was fibreglass in the filter, that’s how they got the micro-pours in them. One company even started using blue asbestos in them, cause product improvement. For some reason, they aren’t allowed to do that anymore, and they indeed made out of treated cotton or wood fibre these days, sometimes with a trace amount of rayon added for heat resistance. So they are a biopolymer made of renewable materials, not really a ‘plastic’ in the way we use the word.
“While it was initially believed that CA was virtually non-biodegradable, it has been shown that after initial partial deacetylation, the polymer’s cellulose backbone is readily biodegraded by cellulase enzymes. In biologically highly active soil, CA fibers are completely destroyed after 4–9 months.”
Sounds a lot like a smoker justifying their careless attitude to littering with cigarette buts.
If someone dropped a cigarette butt here, it would take centuries to make its way to Adelaide, and do you think I would actually care?