Ocean Trash Is No Man's Treasure

The ubiquitous cigarette butt. Lounging on a Manhattan west side stoop the other day, a street janitor sweeping a white, oblong butt into his dustpan caught my eye. Another discarded smoke. It seems everywhere I turn there are cigarette butts. Sources estimate that near one in three butts end up on the ground, leading to somewhere near 4.5 trillion discarded cigarette butts around the world annually. And yet, it’s the trash accumulating in the oceans that really gets me. The Ocean Conservancy reported that in a 2006 worldwide coastal cleanup, 25 percent of the collected debris was left-over cigarettes.

All I can think is: use a portable ashtray, for pete’s sake. Throw your cigarettes in the rubbish bin (after they are very convincingly extinguished with water or much stomping). How did this item become the acceptable thing to chuck on the ground? But the sad part of the story is, they aren’t the only item we are throwing out the window. Or on the sand. Or in the water.

An article in the June 22, 2008 New York Times magazine reports that annually, 52 tons of fresh debris lands on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Further north, in an isolated region of Alaska, two weeks of beach cleaning last summer led to the removal of 60,000 POUNDS – that’s 30 tons – of debris. Litter like this leads to bird and fish deaths, such as by strangulation from discarded fishing gear or six-pack rings, and the ingestion of undigestable plastics.

What’s more – this isn’t just a problem for the trash-creating city or person. That area of Alaska with the tons of trash? Zero people live there. Studies have shown (pdf) that remote oceanic islands have similar levels of debris as industrialized coasts. Why? The oceans are interconnected, and their currents have no boundaries, ultimately moving trash around the globe until it finds a place to moor. Take, for example, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a convergence point for oceanic trash that lies 800 miles west of San Francisco. In an essay, Charles Moore, an environmentalist and sailor, wrote this of the floating landfill: “As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic…In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.”

The Times article, and the experts in it, highlight that while beach cleaning – or street cleaning – is noble and necessary, it is not enough. We need to begin a move, seriously, away from indestructible, non-recyclable material, and we need to reduce our consumption, so we have less to throw away. We also must handle our waste more responsibly, even if that means carrying a cigarette butt around in a somewhat comical portable ashtray until we can find a trashcan. It's imperative: It turns out that one small cigarette butt has the potential for a very long and well-traveled life.