When Did Filtered Cigarettes Start

(CNN)Plastic straws and bags have received widespread attention as pollutants. But another, even bigger, plastic problem has been slipping under the radar -- cigarette filters.

Cigarette butts containing plastic filters are the almost littered item in the world.

"Many smokers presume the filters are made of a biodegradable textile," says Elizabeth Smith, who works on tobacco control policy at the University of California San Francisco.

In fact, filters are made of cellulose acetate -- a type of plastic that tin can accept up to a decade to decompose.

Cigarette butts collect in drains and are washed into waterways.

Merely now the European union is bully downwards on this subconscious problem. New rules will require the tobacco industry to fund the cleaning upward of cigarette stubs, every bit part of a broader initiative to reduce unmarried-utilise plastic items.

Cigarette filters are poisoning our environment -- simply practice they do anything to help smokers' lungs?

The scale of the problem

About six trillion cigarettes are manufactured a twelvemonth and over 90% of them contain plastic filters. That's more than than i million tonnes of plastic.

Tossing a cigarette butt on the basis is one of the near accepted forms of littering, co-ordinate to the Globe Health Arrangement. Well-nigh two-thirds of butts are dumped irresponsibly -- stubbed out on pavements or dropped into gutters, from where they are carried via storm drains to streams, rivers and oceans.

A seagull in Rome mistakes a cigarette butt for something edible.

Cigarette butts have been the number 1 particular nerveless by the Washington DC-based Bounding main Conservancy's global beach clean-ups every twelvemonth since the initiative started in 1986. Its volunteers have collected more 60 million butts.

Nick Mallos, managing director of the group's Trash Free Seas programme, says that "many of those institute on beaches are simply left behind by beachgoers."

A recent study placed fish in h2o in which cigarette butts had been soaked and removed. Afterwards four days, half the fish had died, showing that cigarette butts "seep in into the aquatic environment and are toxic and mortiferous to living creatures," says Thomas Novotny, emeritus professor of global health at San Diego State University, who was involved in the study.

A con?

Plastic filters were invented in the 1950s in response to lung cancer fears.

Tobacco smoke contains nearly 250 harmful chemicals, including heavy metals, arsenic and polonium-210, a highly radioactive substance that has been used in assassinations. At to the lowest degree 69 of these chemicals are known to crusade cancer.

Filters were engineered to reduce lung cancer by blocking toxins.

Scientists test cigarette filters with a smoking machine.

Nevertheless, by the mid 1960s researchers realized that the tar and nicotine they were trying to filter out were the very substances that fabricated cigarettes satisfying to smokers.

The companies kept the filters, but made them less effective to allow through that hit of nicotine.

Bradford Harris dug deep into tobacco company athenaeum while a graduate student of history and applied science at Stanford Academy. He writes that tobacco companies decided to continue the filters as a "marketing tool," while ensuring that smokers even so received the crucial nicotine hit. They made claims about the health benefits of filters that the Earth Wellness Organization calls "fraudulent." CNN contacted the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, which represents a number of major tobacco companies in the UK, for comment, but did not receive a reply.

An advert for Viceroy cigarettes.

In reality, while filters did cake some toxins, they also made cigarette smoke smoother to inhale and that encouraged smokers to puff more frequently. Filters also altered the way tobacco burns, really increasing some toxins in the smoke.

With filtered cigarettes, rates of the nearly common type of lung cancer acquired by filterless smoking decreased. But rates of another type of lung cancer -- adenocarcinoma -- increased.

Chemicals in tobacco smoke cause a range of gruesome diseases.

"The survival rates of the 2 types of cancer are roughly the same," says David Wilson, a pulmonologist the the Academy of Pittsburgh Medical Eye, adding that there is no persuasive evidence that filters "have a beneficial bear on on overall lung cancer survival."

In short, filters didn't improve smokers' health. But they did worsen our environment.

Pollution solutions

In some cities around the earth, fees are already levied on cigarette packets to fund street cleaning, while in other places, litterbugs are fined.

Mervyn Witherspoon, an expert in the chemistry of cigarette filters, believes a better solution woudl be to implement biodegradable filters. He is an counselor to Greenbutts, a visitor which has developed a filter made of natural materials including flax, hemp and cotton.

The Keep Britain Tidy campaign dropped a giant cigarette butt on London's Trafalgar Square to raise awareness.

But Elizabeth Smith, the US-based tobacco policy expert, says biodegradable filters still contain toxins that could take a long time to degrade. And smokers might feel "permitted" to litter biodegradable filters, she adds, which could brand the trouble worse.

In October 2018, the European Parliament backed a radical proposal to oblige EU countries to remove fifty% of plastic from cigarette filters by 2025, and 80% past 2030.

However, Eu state representatives later rejected these reduction targets. Instead, tobacco companies volition exist made responsible for funding awareness-raising campaigns, the provision of public ashtrays and waste collection, and volition have to add labels to packets of filtered cigarettes, stating that they incorporate environs-damaging plastic.

Public ash tray at the State Capitol complex in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Meadhbh Bolger, resource justice apostle at Friends of the Earth, says the new laws are "a significant first step" simply believes that governments should go beyond these measures and set bounden targets.

"We hope that governments volition realize that having a planet nosotros can live on is more important than the interests of the tobacco manufacture."