Difficult and Expensive

• It is difficult to remove cigarette butts from beaches.
  • Fort Lauderdale uses tractors with screens which sweep the beach daily, but screens do not effectively retain cigarette butts.
  • Therefore, removing cigarette butts from the beach is a painstakingly manual process of picking up one cigarette butt at a time.

• It is also expensive to remove cigarette butts from beaches.
  • The Fort Lauderdale Beach Sweep engages hundreds of volunteers to pick up litter from the beach on the second Saturday of every month.
    • They clean up about 1.5 miles of the Fort Lauderdale beach, collecting 7,000 to 10,000 cigarette butts.
    • On an average Saturday volunteers donate approximately 400 hours of their personal time.
    • If these volunteers were to be paid US $15/hour, the cost of cleaning one mile of beach would be US$72,000 per year.
    • Multiply that by the thousands of miles of beaches across America to understand the true magnitude of the cost cleaning up cigarette butts.
      • Florida alone has 825 miles of beautiful sandy beaches.

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Notes