Help reduce plastic pollution by encouraging the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors to pass a ban on tobacco products with plastic filters or tips. You can email all five Supervisors through this email address: BoardOfSupervisors@santacruzcountyca.gov Here are parts of the Surfrider support letter that was submitted for some suggested talking points, and we encourage you to personalize it with your local perspective.
“Beach cleanups are our most popular volunteer activity and cigarette butts are the most common litter item collected overall every year. As an environmental organization, we don’t weigh in regarding smoking in general, but we are adamant in our anti-litter stance and finding solutions to the top-littered items, like the proposed ban on the sale of filtered tobacco products.
Cigarette butts are one of the most littered items on Santa Cruz County’s riverways and beaches. In fact, according to a 2023 NOAA study, an astounding 24.5% of all litter collected on the shoreline of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary between 2017 and 2021 could be attributed to smoking! Cigarette butts are made of cellulose acetate, a non-biodegradable plastic, which breaks into microplastics and bioaccumulates in marine organisms. Cigarette butts are toxic waste and leach dangerous chemicals such as lead, arsenic, and nicotine into the environment where they can poison small children, pets, wildlife, and marine life. They are also a fire hazard, responsible for burning 88,898 acres in California since 1980.
Local jurisdictions and conservation nonprofits like Surfrider have borne the brunt of the cleanup work and associated costs to protect the sanctuary and its human and nonhuman inhabitants from toxic tobacco pollution while the tobacco industry maintains exorbitant profits. It is time for an upstream solution that holds Big Tobacco responsible for its own corporate pollution.
We believe that we have the community and local government support, the decades of litter data, and the regional strategy to justify a strong policy that favors our sanctuary and its people over the profit motives of an exploitative industry. Please ban filtered cigarettes.”
For more info, please visit https://www.santacruzcountyca.gov/TobaccoWasteSubcommittee.aspx and https://beachapedia.org/Cigarette_Butt_Litter