Homemakers want action to stamp out cigarette butt pollution( China Post )
發佈日期： 2012-06-07
TAIPEI--The 10 billion cigarette butts thrown away every year in Taiwan are releasing poisonous chemicals into the environment that will not easily go away, the Homemakers Union said yesterday.
At a press conference, union representatives pointed out that the most common places discarded cigarette butts end up are drains, flower plots and gutters.
As Taiwan has a policy of not allowing garbage to be dropped on the ground, Lin Hsiu-chin, a union official, said each abandoned cigarette butt means that a suspect has got away with littering without being caught.
She called on the government to crack down on such “poisonous garbage creators” and to install more cigarette butt receptacles in public places.
Director Lin Ching-li of the John Tung Foundation agreed that there is an immediate need to tackle the problem, saying that more action needs to be taken to create a healthy environment for the country’s citizens.
Chen Shi-li, a volunteer street cleaner, said she picks up an immeasurable number of cigarette butts every time she goes out.
These butts not only pollute the environment but also create blockages in the sewage system, she noted.
She said the expense for dealing with this problem should not fall on all citizens and that smokers should be responsible for the garbage created by their smoking behavior.
