According to City Environmental Programs Manager Annalise Mannix, 50 people helped clean the island, including students from Horace O'Bryant Middle School. The crew made its way along major streets, picking up the most butts at the Bocce Court near the White Street Pier and the city transit building.
Some of the butts were strewn about right next to ash trays, Mannix said.
Belland's research indicates that given the estimated amount of smokers discards one in three cigarette butts on the ground, it makes for 23,714 butts a day in Key West. More than 176 million butts are tossed on American streets annually. Cigarette butts account for half the litter strewn about most countries, he said.
Cigarette butts, Belland says, contain cellulose acetate, a kind of plastic that takes anywhere from two to 25 years to partially disintegrate. That chemical ends up in the food chain and, subsequently, residents' water supply, fish and birds, he says.
“Everyone on this planet has some degree of petrochemical pollution in their body,” he said, adding that studies have shown strong contamination in the Inuit tribe of northern Alaska. The tribe's diet consists primarily of fish, which leads to the contamination of mothers' breast milk, which breeds infertility, autism and other complications.
His committee is still exploring ways to reduce, if not eliminate, materials made with Styrofoam.
“If Christopher Columbus brought a Styrofoam cup over here, it would still be here today,” Belland said. |
