Brussels Volunteers Collected Up to 270,000 Cigarette Butts in a Day

Originally published 2019-06-14.

A Brussels Cigarette-Butt Cleanup in 2019

Every spring for several years, volunteers in Brussels have spent a day crouching along pavements, tram stops and drains picking up cigarette butts, and the totals have been staggering. A citizen movement called Leo Not Happy reported about 120,000 butts collected by some 200 volunteers in its first big clean-up in 2017. In 2018 roughly 220 people gathered around 240,000, and on 27 April 2019 about 240 volunteers collected some 270,000 in a few hours. Viral posts at the time rounded the 2019 figure up to "300,000 in three hours". Whatever the exact count, the point was hard to miss: the humble cigarette butt is one of the most common pieces of litter on Earth, and it is made of plastic.

The Brussels clean-ups

Leo Not Happy began as an anonymous, masked figure campaigning against litter in the Belgian capital and grew into a volunteer movement. Its butt collections were deliberately visual. Volunteers worked squares such as Place de la Monnaie, Place Jourdan and the square in front of Saint-Gilles town hall, and the piles of butts they gathered were displayed to passers-by. Several Brussels municipalities, including the City of Brussels, Etterbeek and Saint-Gilles, provided equipment and logistical help.

The goal was not just to clean streets for a day. Volunteers handed out around a thousand pocket ashtrays to smokers in 2019, and the organisers planned to mark storm drains with the message that "the sea starts here", a reminder that whatever goes down a drain can end up in rivers and, eventually, the ocean. The organisers had aimed even higher in 2019, hoping for 500 volunteers and half a million butts, which shows how much litter they expected to find.

These totals should be read as estimates. Counting hundreds of thousands of butts one by one is not practical, so large clean-ups usually estimate from weight or volume. Even if the real numbers were somewhat lower, they show how quickly butts accumulate in a dense city.

Why cigarette butts are a plastic problem

Many smokers assume a filter is made of cotton or paper and will simply rot away. In fact most filters are made of cellulose acetate, a plastic fibre. It does break down eventually, but slowly, and how long it takes depends heavily on conditions: sunlight, moisture and microbes all matter. Along the way, a filter falls apart into tiny fibres that behave like other microplastics. Researchers estimate that discarded filters may release vast numbers of microfibres into waterways every year.

A used filter is also loaded with whatever it caught from the smoke. Butts can leach nicotine, heavy metals such as arsenic, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into water. A frequently cited 2011 laboratory study by Slaughter and colleagues found that smoked butts soaked in water were toxic to two species of fish, one marine and one freshwater. Campaigners often say a single butt can pollute 500 litres of water; that figure is widely repeated, including by the Brussels organisers, but it is a rough illustration rather than a measured standard.

The scale is enormous. Around 5.6 trillion cigarettes are smoked worldwide each year, and an estimated 4.5 trillion butts end up as litter, making them the most littered item in the world by count.

What beach clean-up data shows

Ocean Conservancy, a US environmental group, has run its International Coastal Cleanup since 1986, sending volunteers to beaches and riverbanks around the world and recording what they find. Cigarette butts have been the single most collected item for decades. According to the organisation, more than 60 million butts have been picked up since the first clean-up, and for 32 straight years they outnumbered plastic wrappers, containers, bottle caps, cutlery and bottles combined, making up roughly a third of all items collected. In 2017 alone, nearly 800,000 volunteers gathered more than 2.4 million butts.

Most of that litter does not start at the beach. Butts flicked onto city streets are washed by rain into gutters and drains and carried downstream, which is exactly why campaigns like the one in Brussels focus on drains.

Straws got the headlines; butts did not

The Brussels clean-ups came at the height of the campaign against plastic straws. In 2018 McDonald's began switching to paper straws in the UK and Ireland, Starbucks announced it would phase out plastic straws, and Marriott said it would remove them from its hotels worldwide. Those moves were welcome, but by count, cigarette filters are far more common on beaches than straws.

Thomas Novotny, a public health professor at San Diego State University who founded the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project, has argued that filters should be banned altogether. His case rests on two points: they create huge amounts of plastic litter, and they provide no proven health benefit to smokers. Public health researchers have long noted that filters may lower tar readings in machine tests, but smokers tend to compensate by inhaling more deeply, and filters do not remove harmful gases such as carbon monoxide.

Laws have moved slowly. A proposed ban on filtered cigarettes in California failed in committee, and a New York proposal for a refund on returned butts stalled. San Francisco charges a fee on each pack to help pay for clean-up, Washington State imposes a large fine for littering butts, and some jurisdictions, including the European Union, now make tobacco companies share the cost of cleaning up filter waste. Littering fines also apply in many other places, such as the US state of Illinois.

Common myths about cigarette butts

"Filters are biodegradable." Most are plastic. They degrade slowly and leave microfibres behind.
"One butt doesn't matter." Multiplied by trillions a year, single butts are the world's most common litter item.
"Filters make smoking safe." They do not; the health risks of smoking remain very high. Anyone who wants to quit can talk to a doctor or a local stop-smoking service.
"The drain takes it away." Storm drains in many cities empty directly into rivers or the sea without treatment.

What you can do

If you smoke, the simplest step is to treat a butt like any other piece of rubbish: use a bin or carry a pocket ashtray, never a drain, a beach or a flowerbed. If you don't, joining or organising a local clean-up is one of the most direct ways to help, and recording what you find adds to the data that campaigners and lawmakers use. Supporting deposit schemes, producer-pays rules and more ashtray bins near bus stops and café terraces also makes it easier for everyone to do the right thing.

The Brussels volunteers showed what a few hundred people can do in an afternoon. The bigger lesson is that the problem is made one butt at a time, and it can be reduced the same way.