Cigarette butts as a source of microfibers to the environment

Abstract

Several clean-up campaigns have reported that cigarette butts (CB for now on) are the largest item littered worldwide [1]. In 2007, the annual global consumption of cigarettes ascended to 6 trillion, [2, 3, 4] from where approximately 4.5 trillion CBs were carelessly dumped into the environment [5, 6]. Hence, CBs constitute a worldwide and severe toxic litter disposal problem [7]. Yet, little attention is put onto this pollutant