中學生交報告10：Reducing cigarette butts pollution

April 18, 2021

Smoking has been seen as the biggest problem in recent years, due to the negative impacts it has brought on environment and people. It will release carbon dioxide and other toxic chemicals, which cause not only lung diseases by damaging your airways but also air pollution. Besides, second hand smoke is dangerous, too. People who are exposed to second hand smoke have higher health risks than smoker themselves. For example, they are likely to develop cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke. Thus, many countries have enacted laws to restrict smoking. For instance, in Taiwan, our government requires smoker smoking in specific areas.

Furthermore, they need to pay cigarette tax when buying cigarettes. It seems like a good way to reduce the number of people who smoke, but we still can see lots of cigarettes butts on the road. I think the reason is there are no strict law against throwing cigarettes butts at will. However, cigarette butts remain mass and they could also harm the environment. As a result, a large amount of cigarette butts are doing harm to our environment. For instance, in one of the beach cleaning activities last year, more than 4,000 butts were found, which is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the survey, there were 5.6 trillion cigarettes produced yearly, and three quarters of them were discards not properly. They will seep into soil and affect the growth of plants. More seriously, most of them will be taken to the final destination --the oceans. The toxic chemical released from the discarded butts, such as nicotine and heavy metals, can be very harmful to the marine life and even kill them. And they are hard to be decompose. To fix the problem, my families, friends and I established an association. Our goal is to clean up man made trash on roads, on mountains and coastal area, especially cigarettes butts. I think small efforts will make huge difference in the future. So far, we have already picked 8,000 cigarette butts from our neighborhoods lest they influence our environment.

Because we only have one earth. It is necessary to take part in saving our land. I hope we can invite more people to participate in this event and arouse the public awareness of environment protection.