by Dave Wilson (Wilson is the public outreach coordinator for the Maryland Coastal Bays Program)

Most trash is more unsightly than it is toxic, but in the case of cigarette butts the hazards go beyond ugliness.

Smokers discard billions of cigarette butts annually, trading the hassle of using an ashtray for a flick out the window. Boaters often toss them into the water. In either scenario, the butts usually end up in water bodies which has made them the number one piece of trash collected every year during the annual coastal cleanup.

For decades researches have seen their effect on birds and turtles which mistake them for food and perish when they cause a bowel obstruction. However new studies show that butts are toxic to aquatic insects, the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.

About 95 percent of cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate which helps absorb smoke vapors and chemicals. Filters help soak up the highly toxic alkaloid nicotine, a powerful insecticide and among the deadliest of all plant products in its pure form. Additives, including flavoring and humectrants sometimes constitute up to 10 percent of the weight of the"tobacco" portion of a cigarette. The "tar," often referred to in connection with cigarettes, is not a black petroleum tar product but instead refers to the hundreds of substances and additives found in tobacco. Since tobacco is not classified as a food or drug, there are no legal maximums on agricultural chemicals or chemical additives cigarettes may contain.

The US Department of Agriculture estimates that in 1998, 470 billion cigarettes weighing about 180 million pounds were consumed in the U.S. In that same year, Coastal Cleanup volunteers collected 1,616,841 butts.

Curious about the potential impact of so much litter, scientist last year began researching its effects on certain species of planktonic animals. Static acute toxicity tests using such animals have been widely used for decades to estimate the toxicity of chemicals to aquatic invertebrates. Such organisms serve as food for higher consumers such as fishes.

Data collected during the butt experiments were used to develop dose-response curves. Results showed that chemicals in cigarette butts leach quickly into water and are acutely toxic to phytoplankton at concentrations below 0.13 cigarette butts per liter of water. This translates to one cigarette butt per eight liters, or approximately one butt per two gallons of water. The studies also showed that leachate from the remnant tobacco portion of a cigarette butt is deadlier at smaller concentrations than are the chemicals that leach out of the filter portion of a butt.

Cigarette butts in the environment is a litter issue -- not a smoking issue. Smokers must realize that the outdoors are not their personal ashtray and that their litter is killing essential life at the bottom of the food chain and accumulating in higher organisms. Volunteer time and taxpayer money is also being spent to clean up their mess.

The coastal bays deserve better, and considering the amount of energy it takes to use an ashtray, this is one stewardship issue that smokers have no excuse not to espouse.

Note: Kathleen Register, executive director of Clean Virginia Waterways and adjunct faculty in the Department of Natural Sciences at Longwood College in Farmville, VA contributed to this article, parts of which were printed in the "Underwater Naturalist, Bulletin of the American Littoral Society."