Sea Week - Street Sweep. No butts about it.
This year for Sea Week, we’re on a mission to not only clean up the beach, but also to clean up the streets.
That’s right, we want to rid our streets of cigarette butts before they find their way into our oceans.
And we’d like you to join us.
How you can help
On Wednesday, 10 March & Friday, 12 March from 12.30 pm to 1.30 pm, the gloves are going on and we will be walking the streets of our city collecting butts as we see them.
The goal is to jar them up so members of the public can see how bad the problem really is.
We also want to make sure that they don’t find their way to the stomachs of marine life.
Please RSVP by filling out the form below
Why this is important
Globally, smokers buy roughly 6.5 trillion cigarettes each year. That’s 18 billion every day. While most of a cigarette is smoked, the butts of ends (which are made of thousands of cellulose acetate fibres) take years to disappear from the environment.
Butts are often just flicked away, only to end up in our oceans and waterways - making them the most littered item on the planet.
“Butts also contain thousands of chemicals that can kill plants, insects, rodents, fungus and other lifeforms, and some of which are known carcinogens. There have been reports of young children and pet dogs accidentally swallowing cigarette butts, and they’ve even been found in wild animals such as seabirds and turtles. Ingestion can cause vomiting and, in some cases, convulsions. The leachates from cigarette butts can be toxic to aquatic organisms such as bacteria, crustaceans, worms and fish” (The Conversation, 2019).
“Around 10% of cigarette butts are washed into waterways and eventually our oceans”