St. Maarten Private Eye

By Rueben J Thompson

Love the Lagoon, Environmental Protection In the Caribbean

During the week of the Heineken Regatta, EPIC staff witnessed an interesting occurrence at a Lagoon side Bar; Dozens of smokers walked right by numerous ashtrays and garbage bins only to throw their cigarette filters into the Simpson Bay Lagoon, one after the other.

Cigarette filters are not made of paper or cotton as is commonly thought, they are composed of plasticized cellulose acetate and can persist in the environment for years. These filters are designed to absorb some of the metals and chemicals found in cigarettes such as arsenic, lead or cadmium and when filters enter the marine environment many of these toxic substances leach out.

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Research has shown that the abovementioned substances accumulate in the tissues of marine organisms and subsequently bioaccumulate in the food chain. Bioaccumulation is the increase in concentration of a substance along the food chain; a toxic substance is emitted from a land-based source and is deposited in (in this case) the Simpson Bay Lagoon, algae and other micro-organisms absorb the toxins and are then consumed by small fish which are in turn preyed upon by larger fish. As the toxin is transferred up the food chain its concentration can be magnified through bioaccumulation by thousands of times.The large fish are eventually caught and eaten by other animals or by humans, exposing them to large amounts of toxins which will accumulate in their bodies as well.

Cigarette filters themselves look like food to many species of marine and bird life, birds have even been documented feeding filters and other plastics to their young, once ingested filters lead to a false sense of satiation and can block the digestive tract killing the animals within a matter of days.

On the third Saturday of September each year hundreds of thousands of people all over the world participate in the Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) up by removing trash and debris from beaches and other shorelines. EPIC’s partner organization, St. Maarten Pride Foundation is the local coordinator for the International Coastal Cleanup. St. Maarten Pride unifies community councils, religious groups, service clubs and hundreds of other volunteers with the goal of cleaning up St. Maarten’s coastal zones and in so doing highlighting the necessity of improving personal and collective waste management practices.

In 2006 smoking related debris accounted for 17.2 percent of the debris found in the Netherlands Antilles during the annual International Coastal Cleanup, with over 2100 cigarette filters counted and removed from St. Maarten’s shorelines alone. Unfortunately the number of cigarette filters collected and removed during the beach cleanups is only a small fraction of what is discarded along the island’s shorelines, many filters go unnoticed or are ignored as people erroneously believe them to be biodegradable and harmless to the environment.

Perhaps it is time for retailers to provide smokers with portable ashtray’s made of recycled, recyclable or biodegradable materials and to finance an educational campaign geared at stimulating not only smokers but the public in general to dispose of all their (solid) waste in a responsible manner.

Rueben J. Thompson
Project Manager Love the Lagoon, Environmental Protection in the Caribbean

Additional Lagoon Logs - By Rueben J Thompson - EPIC

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