For many of us, smoking is a habit rooted in the past, but cigarettes can damage the environment as well as our health, says Kerry MacKay
ENVIRONMENT
Butt of the problem
For many of us, smoking is a habit rooted in the past, but cigarettes can damage the environment as well as our health, says Kerry MacKay
It always surprises me how many divers smoke. For a sport that is all about breathing, I assumed that divers would choose to take good care of their lungs. I have heard it said that smokers can sometimes achieve enviable air consumption rates on a normal dive, but as soon as they have to work a bit harder, that tank drains pretty fast. Roughly one in seven adults in Britain still smoke. If you do, you’ re up to 30 times more likely to get lung cancer. Smokingrelated illnesses cost the NHS roughly £ 2.5 billion annually, across the UK!
Your health isn’ t the only thing smoking is known to harm. Those pesky cigarette butts are the bane of British streets and our waters. Cigarette butts are the most commonly littered item in the UK, according to data from Keep Britain Tidy. An estimated 28.6 billion cigarettes are smoked in Britain each year. Around 27 billion cigarette butts are discarded improperly each year. Yes, those numbers are rather similar; only 13 % of cigarette butts are put in a bin. The other 87 % end up as litter on our streets, in parks, or down drains.
We all know from our time in the water that what gets littered on land often finds its way into our seas. In 2025, volunteers taking part in the Marine Conservation Society Beachwatch programme recorded 26,577 pieces of smoking-related litter( cigarette butts, filters, lighters, and tobacco packaging) on UK beaches. That’ s an average of two items per 100m of beach.
There is a common misconception that cigarette filters are made from natural fibers that will biodegrade away. The raw material is cellulose acetate, which does originate from wood cellulose. However, it is then tightly plasticised into the cigarette filter, meaning it will not biodegrade in the environment.
Cigarette butts take around 12 years to break down in the environment. As they do so, they release all kinds of nasty chemicals( lead, arsenic, tar, cyanide …) and, of course, microplastics from the filter.
The leached toxins contaminate surrounding water systems and are acutely toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates. One cigarette butt per litre of water was enough to kill 50 % of the fish tested in one US study.
Dropping a cigarette butt is illegal littering and could earn you an on-thespot fixed penalty notice of at least £ 100. Cleaning up cigarette litter costs UK local authorities approximately £ 40 million every year. That’ s tax money you and I pay that could be much better spent elsewhere.
Currently, you must be 18 or older to buy cigarettes, tobacco, and vapes. However, new rules to phase out smoking begin on 1 January 2027, at which point the legal age to buy such items will increase by a year every year. This means that anyone born after Jan 1st 2029 will never be old enough to legally buy tobacco products.
I hope these stark figures will convince you to stop smoking, or at the very least, to put your butts in the bin. If you‘ ain’ t no quitter’, get yourself a butt box( https:// keepbritaintidy. butt-box. com /), and be sure not to litter. I’ ll discuss vapes another time. �
Illustrative graphic generated by AI
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