10,000 cigarette butts in 10 days
Lorella Doherty is not a smoker, but she’s cleaning up the cigarette butts that others leave behind.
‘‘They’re the most littered item in the world,’’ she said.
As part of an education project entitled Rethinking Plastic Revolution, Doherty will spend March 1-10 picking up 10,000 cigarette butts around New Plymouth, even snorkelling beyond the breakwater to collect them from the ocean floor.
The 36-year-old, who calls herself a plastic educator, does daily beach clean-ups and uses the plastic she collects to create murals to educate school children.
She always ignored the cigarette butts as they contaminated the other plastics, until she realised there was a real problem.
‘‘They’re very concentrated and toxic. It’s not just that they’re plastic, but actually they’re very toxic to the environment,’’ she said.
Butts are made of cellulose acetate, a plastic that takes more than a decade to decompose.
But dropping them in the street or on the beach has become a norm for smokers, she said. ‘‘They don’t associate that it’s just like dropping a plastic bag or a straw.
‘‘When they’re dropping them, they’re dropping toxic plastic. They’re not going to break down in a couple of weeks.’’
Doherty will be using the collected butts, which are being stored in a large glass cylinder that she found at a second-hand store, to educate school children.
Doherty said it was not an attack on smokers. Instead, she was educating people on the dangers of throwing away cigarette butts.
The New Plymouth District Council is helping her to make a short video of her mission.
‘‘To help support her we’ll be putting together a short video for our social media channels, and also allowing her access to the footage gathered,’’ NPDC manager of resource recovery Kimberley Hope said.
The council will not be spending any money on the video but will be donating staff time.