Cigarette Butts & Food Packaging Instead of Pristine Beaches

More than 2.5 million kilograms of trash were picked up and disposed of properly by volunteers in coastal regions around the world in 2021, according to the U.S. non-governmental organization Ocean Conservancy. As the following infographic shows, the largest share of offending waste products were wrappers used in food packaging and cigarette butts.

According to data from the Ocean Conservancy's most recent annual report, over 318,000 volunteers collected around 1.3 million pieces of waste food packaging that year as well as over 1.1 million cigarette butts and nearly 850,000 plastic bottles. In total, 9,760,227 pieces of trash were collected.

One discarded cigarette butt may not seem like much, but when it’s on a much bigger scale it of course becomes a far more serious problem. The report cites how studies from recent years have found that when cigarette butts degrade, they can leach toxic substances into the environment and turn into thousands of cellulose acetate microplastics, which can poison local wildlife.

Due to the nature of the survey, the data aggregated by Ocean Conservancy cannot provide a full picture of the pollution on all coasts around the world, and a cross-country comparison is also difficult to make due to the large discrepancy in the cleaned area and the volunteers involved per location. What it does highlight, however, is the widespread nature of improper waste disposal globally and signals to specific areas that need to be targeted.

For more information on the topic download our free report - State of the oceans 2023 - made in collaboration with the German Ocean Foundation.