Drowning in Cigarette Butts: Visualizing the World’s Biggest Polluter
Jun 10, 2022
We smoke approximately 4.5 trillion cigarettes every year–enough to get Saturn and back. But we don’t send the butts to Saturn.
We crush them under our shoes. It is estimated that the US spends $4 billion per year dealing with cigarette litter… but that number is eclipsed by the fact that cigarette butts start forest fires, choke animals, poison sea life, and inhibit plant growth.
To better comprehend the scale of the problem, HouseFresh crunched the numbers to visualize the human-made constructions that would get crushed in a minute, day, week, month, and year of cigarette butts–from an Olympic boxing ring to New York’s Central Park.
