A cigarette butt every meterpieces of plastic up to 50 centimeters in size every two meters. There are 705 pieces of waste every 100 meters of beach according to the survey Beach litter by Legambiente which annually monitors 33 coastal areas in 12 Italian regions. 40.2% of this waste consists of cigarette butts, pieces of plastic, plastic bottle caps and lids (from today the cap attached to the bottle is mandatory in the EU), construction and demolition materials and disposable plastic tableware.
Cigarette waste is 14.4% of the totalfor an average of 101 cigarette butts per 100 meters of beach. For some years now, every summer there are municipalities that ban smoking on the beach. For the sixth consecutive season, Rimini has done so. Also on the Adriatic, smoking is prohibited among the beach umbrellas in Senigallia. In Abruzzo, the Region has included in the ordinance on beach management a ban on smoking in the free-to-use stretch of the shoreline. In Puglia, there is also a regional smoke-free indication. There are local ordinances in Sardinia and Tuscany.
There is no national law prohibiting smoking on beaches. Other countries have also thought about this to reduce the number of smokers on the one hand and pollution on the other. In the French national plan to fight smoking between 2023 and 2027 there is also a ban on lighting cigarettes on the beach.
According to what was published by the Veronesi Foundationtaking up a study by the scientific journal Tobacco Control and the result of the analysis of public sources available in 194 countries by the Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Controlthe costs of environmental pollution, determined by the plastic present in cigarette butts and packaging, amount to about 26 billion dollars a year. Roberto Boffi, head of Pneumology and director of the Anti-smoking Center of the National Cancer Institute of Milan, adds: “40% of waste in the Mediterranean is composed of cigarette butts… Cigarette filters, made of disposable plastic materials, are in fact the most common waste collected worldwide”. Progress has been made on disposable plastic with limitations, but not with cigarette butts that contain plastic. The countries where the environmental impact of cigarette butts is greatest are China, Indonesia, Japan, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
Source: Vanity Fair
I’m Susan Karen, a professional writer and editor at World Stock Market. I specialize in Entertainment news, writing stories that keep readers informed on all the latest developments in the industry. With over five years of experience in creating engaging content and copywriting for various media outlets, I have grown to become an invaluable asset to any team.
