Even though roadside litter has decreased 61% since 1969, we’re still dealing with a massive amount of litter in the United States. Every year, we face about 51 billion pieces of litter on our roadways. This comes out to about 7,000 pieces of litter in every mile. It might seem like litter isn’t a massive problem, aside from being unsightly. After all, people could really just go and clean it up if it gets really bad. However, that’s not totally the case. Most of the litter that we see on our roads – 46.6 billion pieces, to be exact – is smaller than 4 inches in size. While this makes it more difficult for people to clean up, it also makes it easier for the litter to travel with ease. This is demonstrated by the fact that 80% of litter ultimately ends up in rivers, streams, and the oceans.

Litter is Unsightly & Expensive

It’s not often imagined that litter would have an economic cost, but it does! Just to clean up the litter, we’re paying a pretty big price. In the US, we’re paying about $11.5 billion every year to address our litter problems. While local and federal governments, schools, and organizations buy-in in varying degrees, businesses are paying the highest price – at $9.1 billion.

Litter has a negative impact on more than just our wallets! It’s also creating a negative impact on our housing markets. When litter is present in a community, it has the potential to decrease property values by 7%.

Some TN Specifics

Image from: 2016 Tennessee Statewide Litter Study Final Report

Litter in Tennessee is also declining. In the last ten years, the prevalence of litter has dropped by 53%. However, we’re still struggling with lots of litter! On Tennessee roadways, there’s about 100 million pieces of garbage.

If litter is declining, how do we still have so much to deal with? In Tennessee, most of our litter happens accidentally out of negligence. Accidental litter is made up of vehicle debris and trash that flies out of uncovered truck beds – which is one reason why it’s important to Secure Your Load. And there’s still some intentional littering happening! In Tennessee, 28% of the litter we see comes from people purposefully tossing things out of their car windows and such. Regardless how it happens, we pay $15 million dollars annually to pick up litter.

There is some good news in Tennessee, though. Of Tennesseans, 9 out of 10 said they would change their behavior once they learned how big the litter problem actually was. Those who said they would change their behavior noted that they would be willing to throw out their trash properly!

Our Nation’s Biggest Litter

The one item that we see being the littered the most? Cigarettes!

Worldwide, there are about 4.5 trillion discarded cigarette butts – at about 18 billion every day. Even if they aren’t being discarded improperly, smokers around the world are still buying ~6.5 trillion cigarettes every year! With only an estimated 1/3 of cigarettes successfully making it into the trash bin, the worldwide smoking habit contributes a lot to our litter issues! What’s even worse is that they aren’t biodegradable.

The History of Cigarettes

Tobacco, what makes a cigarette a cigarette, has been a part of our culture humans for a really long time (think millennia). It wasn’t until the Revolutionary War that tobacco really started to gain popularity in the US, and this was only the case because revolutionaries were using tobacco as collateral for the loans the French were giving out.

In the 1800s, cigarettes joined in on the tobacco fanfare with cigars, pipes, and snuff. In the 19th century, the development of the cigarette rolling machine finally took place and this skyrocketed the production (and popularity) of cigarettes. During the 1900s, the smoking habits of Americans jumped from 54 cigarettes a year to more than 4,000.

Onto the Filters

Cigarette filters, during the early years, were nonexistent. It wasn’t until the health impacts of smoking became more widely known that filters became the norm. It was in the 1930s that scientists first drew a connection between cigarettes and general public health risks. It wasn’t until almost 1960 that the surgeon general officially noted the causal link between smoking and health impacts like lung cancer – a 70% increase in mortality compared to nonsmokers. Tobacco companies, nearing the end of the 20th century, began to focus more on filtered cigarettes. This made sense for the companies since the sales of filtered cigarettes had begun to overshadow nonfiltered.

Tobacco companies tried out several different filtering methods, ranging from cotton to charcoal to food starch. Ultimately, they ended up on cellulose acetate.

What’s Cellulose Acetate?

It’s a plastic that is molded into a synthetic fiber in the production of cigarette filters. Cellulose acetate is also used in the manufacturing of playing cards and photography film!

But what it boils down to is plastic. When these plastic filters are tossed into our environment, they are doing all of the typical damage plastic does (i.e. microplastics), while adding the nasty impacts of absorbed nicotine, heavy metals, and other chemicals that are taken in during the smoking process. These chemicals are not stagnant in the filters. Once in the environment, these chemicals and by-products can excrete into the surrounding environment.

This is a problem because cigarette butts have been shown to inhibit plant growth! When the butts find their way into our oceans, they also pose a large threat to our marine life, partially because fish can eat them! When you have one cigarette butt in a single liter of water, the cigarette butt can do enough damage to kill half of the fish present.

Stopping Filters

We haven’t been able to get our filter problem under wraps because of general misinformation. Some scientists believe that filters actually create an increased need to smoke. This is because filters are limiting the smoke, but they aren’t limiting the effect nicotine has on our brains and bodies. When we smoke a cigarette with a limited amount of smoke, these scientists believe we’ll just be called to smoke more of them as a means of compensation. In the same respect, there’s an idea among health professionals that filtered cigarettes allow individuals to take deeper breaths of smoke, and to hold them longer! This ultimately has negative effects on the body because the smoke is being drawn deeper into the lungs.

As far as tobacco companies go… they argue that filters are key in keeping their emissions in line when it comes to regulations. Tobacco companies also believe that consumers are the ones hindering a rework of the tobacco industry. If consumers want filters, filters are what consumers will get (or such is the case in the eyes of the tobacco companies).

To read more about health pros and cons of cigarette filters, check out this article in the Atlantic.

What about E-Cigarettes?

E-Cigarettes, or electronic-cigarettes, seem like a mighty alternative until you really break it down. Generally, e-cigarettes have 4 different components: a cartridge or pod that carries that nicotine or “e-juice” solution, a heating component, a battery, and a mouthpiece.

When e-cigarettes first hit the market, they were single-use. This meant that all 4 components had to be trashed when you reached the end of the solution. We now have solution pods that can be replaced, making the e-cigarette reusable. However, e-cigarettes still aren’t easy to dispose of. Regardless of whether or not they are single-use or reusable, the mixed components make e-cigarettes both hazardous waste and electronic waste. For the most part, these different components cannot be disposed of in the same manner!

We currently have more than 10 million Americans who are using e-cigarettes, but the long-term effects of e-cigarette waste are really only starting to be studied.

Addressing Cigarettes and General Litter

To learn more about the effects of cigarettes on our health, our communities, and our environment, check out The Truth. If you are a smoker, Terracycle offers recycling programs for cigarettes. As far as litter and cigarettes, education is a great tool! Many people don’t know that cigarettes are not biodegradable – they just believe nature will run its course when it’s quite the contrary!

KKB hosts public cleanups about once a month, and these are opportunities to clean up all sorts of trash from our parks, our neighborhoods, and our roads. If a cleanup of ours doesn’t work with your schedule, you’re always more than welcome to reach out to us to borrow the necessary supplies – gloves, trash bags, safety vests, and litter pickers – to host your own cleanup.

To contact us about a potential cleanup, please reach out to programs@keepknoxvillebeautiful.org. To see what cleanups we’ll be hosting next, you can visit our upcoming events page here or check us out on Facebook.

Every Litter Bit Matters