Cigarette butts

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A cigarette butt
Cigarette butts in the ashtray
Cigarette butts on the floor
Cigarette butts are often thrown away - here in front of a German hospital

A cigarette butt , colloquially also "stub" or " butt ", is the end of a smoked cigarette . It usually consists of the cigarette filter with paper scraps or without a filter made of paper with tobacco scraps.

Legal

This article or paragraph presents the situation in Germany . Help us to describe the situation in other countries.

As a legal framework for waste disposal , the German Recycling Management Act also regulates the proper disposal of cigarette butts. Outside of approved facilities, cigarette butts are illegally disposed of. This is illegal and is already subject to fines within the framework of municipal responsibility for waste management. It is increasingly being punished by the responsible authorities.

Cultural

In the post-war period in Germany the phenomenon of collecting cigarette butts took on particular proportions, as evidenced by some songs:

An old hit, a parody of Sentimental Journey :

" Imagine we found a cigarette // imagine we found two // imagine we found a third // man, that would be a mess "

In Kippenboogie it says:

And in the morning on the tram - that's where it starts - my neighbor is begging me for a cigarette. This is the tilting boogie - Kämel or Lucki - the length does not matter - we tilt again. 2nd verse: There's a fight at the train station - and everything is careful - because someone throws a cigarette away - and a hundred fall on it. etc.

A special technique for collecting cigarette butts was butting. The butt engraver attached a needle or nail to a stick, which it then used to impale the butts.

Nowadays, collecting cigarette butts is gaining importance again in industrialized nations due to the high cigarette prices.

Dealing with cigarette butts differs greatly in different cultures, for example in Japan it is much more frowned upon than in western countries to drop a cigarette butt or even just ashes on the floor; instead, the use of portable ashtrays is widespread. In Singapore , comparatively high fines are due for caught butt throwers. In Europe, it is most frowned upon in German-speaking Switzerland. 21 US communities that line the Cigarette Litter Prevention Program of the organization Keep America Beautiful involved could that Kippen- littering decrease within one to four years on average by 42 percent. There are anti-littering initiatives in numerous cities in Germany.

In 2012, the city of Vienna issued a series of humorous commercials against littering, one specifically related to cigarette butts thrown out of the car. In 2011, littering with dog feces or cigarette butts cost € 36 as an organ fine in Vienna, € 75 as an administrative fine in one documented case and € 1,000 as a penalty. From 2011, small pin boards in green spaces and greenery along the road in Vienna also pointed out this sentence and patrolled “Waste-Watchers” over the Vienna Cleanliness Act. In Graz, the organ penalty rate is only 10 € (as of 2014), in contrast to Vienna, no punishments were known in Graz and Linz at that time.

In Paris , the penalty for throwing away a cigarette was increased from € 35 to € 68 on October 1, 2015. Street cleaning collects 350 tons of stumps every year. In the months before the penalty increase, 30,000 new rubbish bins were set up, and throughout September before the increase, "no penalty tickets" were distributed by the law enforcement officers to draw attention to the new regulation.

hazards

environmental pollution

Animals can mistake cigarette butts for food and die on it
Juvenile red billed gull smoking.jpg
A red-billed gull with a cigarette butt
Cyprinus carpio smoking.jpg
A carp with a cigarette butt

The disposal of the remains of cigarettes outside of the designated collection containers, for example by carelessly throwing away cigarette butts in the great outdoors or in public streets, represents a serious environmental burden. During clean-up campaigns in cities and coastal waters, they account for 30 to 40 percent of the waste.

The number of cigarette butts thrown away worldwide each year is estimated at 4.5 trillion. According to a study by TU Berlin in 2014, there are an average of 2.7 million dumps on one square kilometer of open space.

According to the WHO, they contain up to 7,000 different chemicals, many of which are toxic to the environment and at least 50 are carcinogenic. More recent studies by NIST confirm this statement. The majority of the pollutants contained in tobacco smoke, especially nicotine, collects in the cigarette filters as intended . This is classified in the GHS (Globally Harmonized System) hazardous substances law, among other things, as toxic for aquatic organisms with long-term effects ( H 411). Just under two milligrams of nicotine can be washed out of a stub - for example by rain - into the soil and water. In addition, used cigarette filters can also contain arsenic , lead , chromium , copper , cadmium , formaldehyde , benzene , nitrosamines , polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), tar and tobacco additives from residual tobacco .

The toxins mainly affect waters and their inhabitants. For example, one cigarette per liter of water is fatal for fish and one cigarette per eight liters of water for water fleas (50 percent death rate in each case). Another problem is that animals can mistake the stub for food, causing serious health problems or even death.

The cigarette filter made of cellulose acetate takes a long time to decompose in nature. It is assumed to be 15 years in fresh water and even 400 years in salt water. The decay products of brand-new filters also reduce the germination and growth of grass and clover.

Fire hazard

Thrown away, still smoldering cigarette butts can cause fires . These often cause considerable damage and can also endanger human life.

Ingestion by children

Children sometimes put a found cigarette butt in their mouth, either out of curiosity or to imitate adults who smoke. Depending on the body weight, one to three swallowed cigarette butts can lead to significant symptoms of intoxication such as nausea, diarrhea and / or vomiting. For example, between 2015 and 2017 , the Berlin poison emergency number received 2,888 calls due to cigarette butts swallowed by children. In 2007 there were 260 emergency calls from those affected because children had swallowed cigarettes or parts of them. In 2010 there were 921 cases.

There is no uniform smoking ban on children's playgrounds in Germany and Switzerland, but some federal states (e.g. Bavaria) and individual municipalities (e.g. Heidelberg , Dresden ) have issued corresponding bans. Smoking has been prohibited on children's playgrounds in Bremen since July 2013; this state law is initially limited to August 2018. In Berlin, with the exception of the Neukölln and Treptow-Köpenick districts, smoking is prohibited on all playgrounds.

A study by the German Cancer Research Center in 2010 showed that, despite the corresponding smoking ban, there are still more than 50 cigarette butts per playground in Würzburg, for example.

In Austria, as of September 2014, there is a smoking ban on playgrounds in the Carinthian cities of Villach and Wolfsberg . Since the presidential office said that a smoking ban would only hold before the constitutional judges if it prevents a "permanent maladministration", a similar ordinance was thwarted by a municipal council resolution in Graz . In Vienna, smoking on children's playgrounds has been banned since at least 2008.

Curious benefit for the fauna

In Mexico, bullfinches and sparrows often build cigarette butts into their nests. A 2012 study found that cigarette filters were integrated into around 90 percent of all nests. It has been proven that the extent of mite infestation correlated strongly negatively with the number of butts used to build nests. The nicotine it contains is a powerful insecticide . It remained unclear whether the animals used this purposefully or "whether it was a coincidental additional effect" .

Web links

Commons : Cigarette Butts  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: cigarette butts  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b BT-Drs. 19/7380
  2. ↑ An example with a slightly different text ( Memento from September 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Kippenboogie
  4. ↑ When the war ended
  5. ↑ Not everything is clean in Singapore either
  6. ↑ Cigarette butt disturbing factor , tagesanzeiger.ch from April 30, 2015, accessed May 9, 2015
  7. ↑ Keep America Beautiful
  8. ↑ Campaigns for a clean landscape
  9. ↑ No small matter: cigarette butts on the street , youtube.com, Die 48er, MA 48, Video 0:20, Vienna, March 14, 2012, accessed October 1, 2015.
  10. ↑ Throwing away cigarette butts is expensive in Paris , orf.at, September 30, 2015, accessed October 2, 2015.
  11. ↑ a b Press kit Tobacco and Environment of the DKFZ, pages 51–57 concern cigarette butts ( memento from June 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 9.1 MB).
  12. ↑ a b Environmental pollution - nicotine pollutes water. Retrieved October 16, 2019 .
  13. ↑ dpa: WHO: Cigarette butts are environmental toxins. June 1, 2017, accessed October 16, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Dustin Poppendieck, Mengyan Gong, and V.. Pham: Influence of temperature, relative humidity, and water saturation on airborne emissions from cigarette butts . In: Science of The Total Environment . tape 712 , April 2020, p. 136422 , doi : 10.1016 / j.scitotenv.2019.136422 .
  15. ↑ a b c Cigarette butts belong in the residual waste . (PDF) [Carinthian Institute for Lake Research], August 2012; accessed on October 9, 2019.
  16. ↑ Dannielle S. Green, Bas Boots, Jaime Da Silva Carvalho, Thomas Starkey: Cigarette butts have adverse effects on initial growth of perennial ryegrass (gramineae: Lolium perenne L.) and white clover (leguminosae: Trifolium repens L.) . In: Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety . tape 182 , 2019, p. 109418 , doi : 10.1016 / j.ecoenv.2019.109418 .
  17. ↑ CHRU Lille Poisoning by cigarettes in children (French) ( Memento from November 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  18. ↑ Thomas E. Novotny, Sarah N. Hardin, Lynn R. Hovda, Dale J. Novotny, Mary Kay McLean: Tobacco and cigarette butt consumption in humans and animals . In: Tobacco Control . tape 20 , Suppl 1, May 1, 2011, p. i17 – i20 , doi : 10.1136 / tc.2011.043489 , PMID 21504918 , PMC 3088460 (free full text).
  19. ↑ Throwing away cigarette butts is rarely punished. Retrieved October 11, 2019 .
  20. ↑ Brochure Smoke-Free Children's Playgrounds ( Memento from March 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 8.9 MB) of the Berlin Friedrichshain / Kreuzberg district office, 2007, p. 34, accessed on October 24, 2012.
  21. ↑ a b Ute Mons, Florian Gleich, Martina Pötschke-Langer: Health risks for children from smoking in playgrounds - no smoking signs protect children . Ed .: German Cancer Research Center. Heidelberg 2010 ( slsev.de [PDF]).
  22. ↑ Smoking is prohibited on Bremen playgrounds .
  23. ↑ Constantin Schöttle: Smoking ban on children's playgrounds: Neukölln smoke signals . In: The daily newspaper: taz . June 13, 2012, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed October 11, 2019]).
  24. ↑ For the time being no smoking ban on Graz playgrounds , orf. September 19, 2014, accessed October 2, 2015.
  25. ↑ Green Area Ordinance § 10 , accessed November 30, 2019.
  26. ↑ M. Suarez-Rodriguez, I. Lopez-Rull, C. Macias Garcia: Incorporation of cigarette butts into nests reduces nest ectoparasite load in urban birds: new ingredients for an old recipe ?. In: Biology Letters. 9, 2012, p. 20120931, doi: 10.1098 / rsbl.2012.0931 .
  27. ↑ Wissenschaft.de: Nester aus Kippen , December 5, 2012, accessed December 13, 2017.