No more butts

Growing awareness of the harm done to ecosystems through disposal of vast quantities of plastic has created public outrage and compelled governments to act.1 The European Union, for example, will ban many single-use plastic products, such as cutlery, plates, and straws, from 2021.2 However, these measures do not extend to one of the leading sources of plastic waste worldwide that is hiding in plain sight: the cigarette butt.

The largest part of most cigarette butts is a non-biodegradable plastic filter made of cellulose acetate.3 Filters first appeared in the 1950s following early health concerns about cigarettes, and their rapid adoption was helped by the post-war explosion in manufacturing of plastics.4 The tobacco industry portrayed filters as a way to make cigarettes safer by absorbing some of the “tar” that was implicated in the lung cancer epidemic. We now know that this safety argument was a myth (box 1), one of many created by the tobacco industry to sell cigarettes.6