Cigarette Butts harm fish

Here are some facts:

• In one British Columbia beach cleanup 913,771 cigarette butts were collected.

• Cigarette butts are made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic.
• Cigarette butts take up to five years to decompose

• Cigarette butts are found in the stomachs of marine creatures that mistake them for food.

Those are pretty disgusting statistics, but cigarette butts are only a much larger plastic problem for the oceans.

• Plastics comprise 60 to 90 percent of all ocean debris
• One estimate has 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating on every square mile of ocean.

• Plastics do not biodegrade. They break down into smaller and smaller pieces until you have plastic dust.

• Plastics kills over a million seabirds each year.
• Plastics kills hundreds of thousands of seals, sea turtles, whales and coral each year.
• Fish accumulate plastic toxins from eating smaller fish.
• Fish with most the toxins are halibut, rockfish and cod

• Toxins will show up in consumer tests.
• Once that happens the commercial fishermen’s product image is somewhere between the garbage pail and a medical alert.