Last month, a volunteer group bent on eliminating discarded cigarette butts recently fanned across the streets of East Harlem to collect them. Cigarette butts are small, but still considered the most common form of litter, according to new research.
, according to new research commissioned last year by the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful, and they are anything but benign.
“They smell terrible, hard to pick up and they’re everywhere,” said Bialik, a petite redheaded senior citizen who usually dresses in a cigarette butt costume made of cardboard when she’s out collecting. But not on a cold winter day. It’s too difficult, she explained, to collect butts with a coat underneath it. She and other volunteers began grabbing at butts trapped inside gaps in the sidewalk, the first of thousands they collected over a five-block stretch in the proceeding hour.
Just having them on the ground is hazardous, according to Thomas Novotny, a medical epidemiologist and executive director of the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project. “It’s a vicious circle, what we are doing to our environment every day,” said Ana Navas-Acien, an environmental health sciences professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “We are eating, breathing in and drinking toxic products, resulting in premature death and disease.”
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