In the decade between 2013-23, volunteers and nonprofits picked up 439,358 cigarette butts from Santa Cruz County’s beaches and natural areas, accounting for a quarter of all litter found here.
That’s according to Save Our Shores (SOS), a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that works to support the ecosystems of the Monterey Bay.
In response, the organization is teaming up with other nonprofits and local elected leaders to craft an ordinance that would ban the sale of filtered tobacco products in the unincorporated parts of the county, as well as the cities of Capitola, Watsonville, Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz.
“We’re targeting this item not to prevent people from smoking, but because it’s one of the number-one items we find in the environment,” said SOS Program Manager Krista Rogers.
That’s a problem, Rogers said, because the filters are made from non-biodegradable plastic, which takes more than a decade to break down. And when they do, it turns into microplastics, which have been found throughout the environment, including in marine animals.
Worse, the filters leach dangerous chemicals such as arsenic and nicotine into the environment.
“If you drop a cigarette butt in a fish tank, it will kill all the fish,” Supervisor Manu Koenig said.
The proposed “Ban the Butt” ordinance—still in the pre-planning phase—is not unprecedented in its scope.
In May 2023, the board unanimously passed a resolution recognizing tobacco waste as a threat to health and the environment, and to form an ad-hoc committee to study the issue.
In August 2019, the Supervisors voted to ban the sale of plastic water bottles at county facilities,
The county banned single-use plastic bags in March 2012, and followed suit with a ban on single-use plastic shampoo bottles at hotels in November 2018.
“This is in keeping with our environmental legacy already, and the data shows pretty clearly that cigarette butts are the number-one most littered item,” Koenig said.
The move is almost certain to garner attention from the tobacco industry, which spends millions of dollars every year to quash public health policies.
According to Action on Smoking and Health, the industry in 2023 had 262 lobbyists at the federal level.
But that is not a deterrent to the supporters of the ordinance, which is expected to be considered in the fall after a publicity campaign.
“That actually just makes us work harder,” Rogers said. “We believe in the mission of our organization and the work we do, and we see the effects of this item first-hand. We definitely do recognize that we are going up against a giant lobbyist, and that’s why we want to start small.”
Wow! Commiefornia is right on track to take away your freedom. They started with the ban on flavored tobacco and now its the filtered cigarettes. What will they be after next? More laws doesn’t mean a more lawful community.
There are numerous ways to satisfy a nicotine addiction that don’t lead to polluted oceans, mass animal die-offs, and littered beaches, TMR. One thing you can be happy about–this potential law will let you indulge your greatest addiction: complaining about how absolutely everything you don’t like is an imposition on your freedom.
You completely miss the point. Why don’t they just make it illegal to litter?…. Oh wait…
If the point is that OP thinks he has an absolute right to a habit that pollutes everyone and everything around him, you can miss me with that point every day of the week.
Same logic goes for lithium batteries since they pollute everything and everyone around. Seems like we should be banning those instead. Not to mention the poor people who have to provide raw materials like cobalt and whatever else is needed for first world products we use on a daily basis. I guess your morals go out the window with that sort of thing.
So they loose the cigarette tax. Then people go to Monterey or over the hill to buy cigarettes
Santa Cruz hahahahahaha the laughing stock of the country
What a bunch of idiots hahahahahahha
They don’t really have the right to ban filter smokes. Any such ban would be overturned in federal court.