Volunteers pick up nearly one million toxic cigarette butts

Volunteers from 25 different countries collected nearly one million cigarette butts from towns, cities and the countryside on Saturday, as what began as a Dutch campaign continues to grow abroad.

In Leiden, the Grachtwacht campaign group hosted its fifth annual Leiden cigarette clean-up, with some 30 volunteers collecting over 35,000 discarded cigarette ends around the city in two hours.

The aim of “No Butts Day”, which first took place in the Netherlands in 2019, is to persuade governments to ban plastic cigarette filters. ''In decades we'll look back and think: how could we have let this widespread toxic pollution happen?'' says coordinator Bernadette Hakken.

Saturday's haul in Leiden was only a small portion of the total number of filters that never make it into ashtrays. The organization says smokers toss well over a billion of them into the streets every year, which is just one of the reasons why they're calling for a ban.

An estimated two-thirds of the butts used in the Netherlands end up in the environment. Each filter is packed full of chemicals and other additives which leach into the soil and waterways. The plastic also takes decades to break down.

Birds and other types of wildlife also often mistake them for a tasty snack.

“Filters have been found in the stomachs of birds,” biologist and Grachtwacht co-founder Liselotte Rambonnet told Dutch News.

“ Some birds use them for building their nests and they work as a pesticide to help them keep away parasites,” she said. “But it's an evolutionary trap. The filters keep away bugs, but they can kill the birds if there are too many.”

The Grachtwacht set a time limit of two hours for their volunteers to gather filters and bring them to their headquarters in a former bridge house along the Oude Vest canal.

“I've collected 750 so far,” one volunteer reported while cleaning up around the Café Jantje van Leiden, a brown bar in the center of the city. “It's always so dirty around here.”

Another volunteer found several hundred scattered outside the LUMC, Leiden's university hospital.

Rambonnet said there seemed to be even more cigarette ends than usual on Leiden's streets this year.

She credited the recent heatwave, which kept its cafe terraces packed earlier this week, and the first day of Stadsfestival de Lakenfeesten , an annual festival that attracts thousands of people to the city every summer.