Ideally people wouldn’t flick cigarette butts on footpaths, streets and beaches. Not only are they unsightly, they impact our waterways, soil and wildlife because they contain plastic and 7,000 chemicals, of which nearly 100 are toxic to aquatic life.

While public awareness campaigns continue to try and reduce the number of butts discarded, there are new local initiatives happening to reduce cigarette butts’ collective impact on the environment.

Cairns Regional Council is partnering with environmental charity No More Butts and Clean Up Australia to hold ‘Big Butt Hunts’ in the city annually, and Cassowary Coast Regional Council is also coming on board this year. In 2023, Cairns volunteers collected 10,350 butts during the one-hour event.

Shannon Mead, Executive Director of No More Butts, says the clean-up events are held just before the wet season to reduce the amount of cigarette butts being flushed into waterways.

“Our main goals are to raise awareness about cigarette litter and to mobilise the community to take action,’’ he says.

“Partnering with councils, businesses, local rangers and other like-minded groups is having a great impact. The ultimate goal is to remove plastic cigarette filters, but for now we need to focus our efforts on prevention and picking up these toxic nasties.”

Dr Elsa Antunes, a chemical engineer at James Cook University, is partnering with No More Butts to turn the cigarette butts collected during clean-up events into char, a charcoal-like substance that can be used to sequester carbon, improve soil health and filter water.

“We already had a process for turning waste products into biochar, but we were excited when Shannon approached us about processing cigarette butts,” Elsa says.

“As a char product they can be used in the mining industry to remove heavy metals from water. It is a scalable idea so now we are assessing whether it is economically viable.”

Tangaroa Blue Foundation has been collecting data during its beach clean ups since 2008, and almost 60,000 cigarette butts were picked up in that time in the Wet Tropics region.

To help reduce cigarette litter, it launched its ‘Ditch the Flick’ campaign in 2020. The campaign targets litter hotspots and then works with local businesses to install educational signage and to distribute mint tins for customers to use as personal butt bins.

Fast facts:

• An estimated 8.9 billion butts are part of the litter problem in Australia each year.
• 40% make their way into waterways.
• They take up to 15 years to break down in water.