Cigarette butts are the ocean’s single largest source of trash
By Viktoria Ney and Ruqayyah Moynihan, for Business Insider Deutschland
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]cean pollution is a very serious issue, and one that seems to be cropping up a lot in the news at the moment.
Often, when we hear the term “ocean pollution”, it’s straws, bottles, and other plastic garbage that come to mind. But there’s another sort of waste that’s far worse and has, so far, received far less attention than it warrants.
By Dennis Mojado under license.
The spotlight is now on cigarette filters.
At first, they may seem small and relatively harmless, but they can cause irreversible damage to oceans and wildlife in general, particularly in the numbers in which they’re currently found.
NBC News released a report citing data collected by NGO Ocean Conservancy, which has been organising beach cleanups since 1986.
According to data collected by Ocean Conservancy, approximately 60 million cigarette filters have been collected since the 1980s.
This massively exceeds the number of plastic bags, food wrappers, drinks bottles or straws cleaned up from our oceans.
