Donal Hickey: Butts are no joke in littering

It seems many people still don’t regard throwing a cigarette butt onto the street, or out a car window, as littering.

What’s more, the butts can also be harmful because they contain plastic as well as poisons filtered from the cigarette smoke.

This infernal waste can end up anywhere and now accounts for 56% of all litter in Ireland, surveys find.

Butts can take up to 12 years to degrade and leak toxins that harm fish life and the environment.

This brings us to the annual Clean Coasts Big Beach Clean, on September 15 to 17; a huge effort which last year involved more than 3,000 volunteers in 157 clean-ups.

They removed over 18 tonnes of marine litter and, as in previous years, cigarette butts topped the list with about 2.4m collected.

Overall, plastic was a major component of the waste.

It is regularly found in the stomachs of fish, birds, whales and other marine creatures which mistake it for food.

Also close to the top of the list were food wrappers and plastic bottles.

And notably, plastic shopping bags were prominent, despite attempts to get us to stop using them.

Sometimes, action to solve one environmental/ health problem can cause others.

The smoking ban is forcing drinkers out of pubs, not all of which provide smoking areas. So, people take their puff on the streets.

Publicans generally try to provide ash trays, but they are not always used as anyone can see from the amount of butts on footpaths close to some premises.

With cigarette waste, including butts, packets, and matches, making up more than half the litter in Dublin, the city council recently launched a new campaign to get people to use ashtrays.

Every butt is a littering incident and, according to Simon Brock, of the council’s waste management team, its Bin the Butt campaign, is aimed at making people precisely aware of that.

Casting a butt onto the street can result in an on-the-spot fine of €150 under the Litter Act. Have yet to hear of it happening though.

In former Tidy Towns winner Killarney, Co Kerry, a large volunteer corps is involved in litter-picking and improving the overall appearance of the tourist mecca.

Yvonne Quill, chairwoman of Killarney Looking Good, described cigarette butts as “the bane of our lives’’.

She urged people to use butt trays which are inserted on the top of many litter bins. No doubt, people similarly involved other towns would concur.

Back to coastal littering.

Volunteers recently collected 70 bags of litter and marine debris matted onto sand and rock on Ireland’s Eye, Howth, Co Dublin, an island with a low level of human footfall and habitat for seabirds and seals.

An indication of the scale of a global problem.