We’re all trying to be more ecologically conscious these days, and for many of us, it means reducing our usage of single use products.Switching from regular cigarettes to vaping can help us take better care of the environment as cigarettes create a lot of waste compared to vape.
Cigarette butts are not only awful to smell, but they are also one of the most common sources of pollution in the world. According to Vaping.com there are an estimated 4.5 trillion individual cigarette butts currently contaminating the oceans, making them a greater polluter than commonly used plastic products such as bottles, bags, or plastic straws.
Cigarette butts, by the way, aren’t made of paper. The great majority are made of cellulose acetate, a man-made material that takes roughly ten years to biodegrade.
According to the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project, smoking-related waste accounts for nearly a third of the debris seen on beaches, rivers, and streams today. Cigarette buts, unlike plastic waste from vaping items, contain all of the harmful compounds contained in smoke. That’s why used cigarette filters get those horrible brown stains. Chemicals such as formaldehyde, arsenic, lead, copper, chromium, cadmium, and a range of polyaromatic hydrocarbons can all be found in cigarette butts. From the minute they’re stubbed out, cigarette butts leech harmful chemicals into our natural systems.
We could go on to discuss how many millions of dollars are spent each year attempting to clean up all of this waste, but the fact is that if you’ve moved from smoking to vaping, you’ve already made an environmentally friendly choice.