Message from 60,000 cigarette butts ‘pro-environment, not anti-tobacco’
POLLUTION caused by cigarette butts was highlighted at the weekend when Pick It Up Guernsey used more than 70,000 to send a message.
The butts included 60,000 collected in a single day across the Bailiwick – islanders were encouraged to pick them up on Friday, which was World No Tobacco Day.
On top of those were another 10,000 collected by volunteers plus another 2,000 collected by Pick It Up Guernsey’s Andrew Munro.
Mr Munro said he did his collecting on the way to and from work and over lunch hours during the course of a month.
Setting up an information stand outside the Guernsey Information Centre at North Plantation on Saturday, the butts were tipped out of a container onto the cobbles and used to create an environmental message.
‘The message is not anti-tobacco, it’s pro-environment,’ said Mr Munro.
‘We’ve been trying to raise awareness that these are made of plastic – cellulose acetate – and they have more than 4,000 toxins, including radioactive polonium 210.’
Mr Munro is founder of registered charity the Clean Earth Trust, of which Pick It Up Guernsey is a part.
He said that until a couple of years ago he had no idea that cigarette butts contained plastic.
After spending the day getting the message across, the butts were taken away by the Youth Commission for additional promotion of the message.
Finally, the butts will be shipped free to the UK where a specialist recycling company will remove the paper for recycling, melt down the cellulose acetate and turn it into machine parts, said Mr Munro.
Among the passers-by watching as the pile of butts was tipped onto the cobbles outside the information centre was a woman who had a strong reaction to the sight: ‘They look absolutely disgusting,’ she said.
‘I used to smoke 100 a day before I had my first heart attack,’ added the woman, who asked not to be named.
‘How much money have people wasted on those?’
Mr Munro had a number of litter pickers on-hand which had been loaned to people to collect the discarded butts, and he said that during the day a family of French tourists borrowed some and went off for two hours to do their bit.
Stuart Mauger was one of the people who collected cigarette butts with colleagues on Friday: ‘I was surprised at how quickly I got 100,’ he said. ‘I ended up getting 500 in 40 minutes. I don’t know whether some places had cleaned up a little bit beforehand.’
