CURTIS BOVEE
STAFF WRITER
On Friday, April 20, a group of 41 student volunteers participated in CSUSM’s first cigarette butt cleanup, called “Kick Butts off CSUSM.”
Cigarette butts are a form of non-biodegradable litter, meaning that when they are discarded, they stay around. As a result, their presence is seen in streets, drains, rivers, beaches and the ocean, ultimately polluting the environment even further.
Students and faculty of the Graduate School of Public Health at SDSU developed original methodology for the cleanup event. This year marks SDSU’s 3rd annual cigarette butt cleanup.
The event on CSUSM was coordinated by Dr. Devan Romero, assistant professor of kinesiology at CSUSM, and Vanessa Martinez, a senior kinesiology student at CSUSM.
Each of the 41 volunteers present collected cigarette butts for one hour, with a grand total of 5,389 cigarette butts.
“These findings are astonishing as there is already a group on campus that picks up cigarette butts and other campus litter each week and we collected over five-thousand butts in only one hour,” Romero said.
The purpose of the event, according to Romero, is to:
•Create environmental awareness of cigarette butt litter as toxic waste.
•Create a partnership with SDSU to advocate for smoke free environments.
•Inform students of the complex problem of cigarette butt waste from an environmental and behavioral perspective.
According to the National Institute of Health, by 2025, an estimated 9 trillion cigarettes will be consumed worldwide, while 1.69 billion pounds of butts will wind up as litter worldwide per year.
Romero hopes that her research will help to drastically reduce these figures.
“My future research will revolve around whether raising awareness of cigarette butts as toxic waste and as a detriment to the campus environment changes litter behavior, ultimately reducing it. Also, whether the impact of knowing the extreme toxicity of cigarette smoking to our environment’s health will motivate smoking cessation in the college population,” Romero said.