42,000 cigarette butts picked up in one day

Saturday 01 June 2019

A horde of volunteers have swept through Guernsey in the last 24 hours picking up cigarette butts from streets, carparks and gardens.

And for the rest of the weekend, those volunteers will carry on picking up people's butts, hoping to clean up the island, but also encourage them to not throw them on the ground in the future.

Andrew Munro, who has set up the initiative, has set a goal for himself and volunteers to pick up 60,000 butts in the 72 hours over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. By the afternoon of Friday, they had already collected 42,000.

The College of FE dropping off their bucket full. 

People were dropping off the butts they had collected to a point outside of the tourist information centre in Town. Sarah Mills, one of Mr Munro's volunteers from Ogier, was manning the stand. 

"Cigarette butts take more than 15 years to break down when they are dropped on the ground, and there are so many chemicals in them, along with the different micro plastics," she said.

"They are extremely harmful to the environment and the water - dangerous to animals and birds and sea life. Just this morning, I was picking up around the Boathouse, and I collected over 1,000 just from the small beach area."

But the aim of the volunteer drive is not just to clean up Guernsey. It is also to raise awareness about why you shouldn't drop your cigarette butts, and should dispose of them properly. 

The volunteers will be out and about 'wombling' for the rest of today and tomorrow. Mr Munro started early yesterday and went though until 20:00, and he plans to continue with that through the weekend. 

Mr Munro also arranged some competitions, which have been sponsored by Ravenscroft which include a £100 prize for the most butts collected in one of two categories: schools, not for profit organisations and individuals, and corporate teams. 

Ms Mills said they had all sorts of people coming to drop off buckets, jam jars and bags all filled with cigarette butts all day long, whether they be young or old, or on holiday or from a business. A trend she had noticed was that car parks had the most littered around them. 

To read more about the reasons behind the push, click here.