Tiny but Deadly: a Threat to Environment

Cigarette butts are small which tend to go unnoticed. It is the common form of plastic pollution. It contains hundreds of toxic chemicals, which when released can be a serious threat to us and to our environment. The theme of World No Tobacco Day 2022 is “Tobacco: Threat to our environment.” This puts our focus on cigarette butts. Hence the aim of this study was to analyse the metals leached out from cigarette butts. The objectives was to quantify and compare metals leached out from the filter part of the cigarette butts and the whole cigarette butts. The methods followed was the cigarette butts were collected from smokers. Following collection, Cigarette butts and only the filter part of the cigarette butts were added separately to aqueous solution of 50 ml of concentrated HCL in deionized water. pH of the solution was adjusted to 6. It was allowed to soak for 24 hours. The trace metals concentration from the resultant leachate was estimated using Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES). From the results, Metals such as Al (4.2 ppm), Cu (5.5 ppm) and Sr (3.6 ppm) were identified from the leachates of filter part of the butt alone and metals such as Ba (9 ppm), Fe (3 ppm), Sr (31 ppm), Cu (8 ppm), and Al (17 ppm) were identified from the leachates of whole cigarette butt. The study concludes that multiple metals are released from the butts which can be a potential source of threat to the humans and to the environment.