Local weather activists in Portugal collected some 650,000 cigarette butts and piled them up within the coronary heart of Portugal's capital Lisbon in an effort to focus on the truth that they don't decompose.
"The primary drawback with cigarette butts is that they don't seem to be biodegradable - they include a type of plastic and, even worse, loads of toxins, heavy metals and chemical compounds," defined Andreas Noe, the German activist behind the initiative.
In keeping with the World Well being Group, 4.5 trillion cigarette ends are thrown away annually worldwide.
Noe stockpiled the cigarette butts at Lisbon's well-known Praça do Comércio. He mentioned that the 650,000 butts had been collected in only one week.
The butts include a "type of plastic and even worse, loads of toxins and heavy metals and chemical compounds. Below the rain all of these toxins are getting flushed out of the cigarette butts and going straight onto the road... and for instance, right here, we're subsequent to the Tagus River and it leads straight to the ocean" Now concluded.