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Cigarettes are killing our planet.
We smoke approximately 4.5 trillion cigarettes every year–enough to get Saturn and back. But we don’t send the butts to Saturn.
We crush them under our shoes. It is estimated that the US spends $4 billion per year dealing with cigarette litter… but that number is eclipsed by the fact that cigarette butts start forest fires, choke animals, poison sea life, and inhibit plant growth.
The world’s cigarette butt litter in U.S. landmarks
To better comprehend the scale of the problem, HouseFresh crunched the numbers to visualize the human-made constructions that would get crushed in a minute, day, week, month, and year of cigarette butts–from an Olympic boxing ring to New York’s Central Park.
Data for cigarette butt cubic meter volume comes from Omni Calculator and is based on 170 cigarettes filling 1 liter of volume. The number of cigarette butts littered worldwide per year comes from Science Direct.
Cubic meter volume of objects and landmarks determined by surveys were sourced from Wikipedia and the Google Maps distance measurement tool. Volumes of buildings (factoring in building/object shape) were compared to the cubic meter volume of cigarette butts scatted per year, month, week, day, and minute.
Global smoking rates were derived from the World Bank. Global cigarette consumption is sourced from Tobacco Atlas.
Here’s a preview of a month’s worth (375 billion) of cigarette butts in the Capitol Building:
The Environmental Impact of Cigarette Butts
Time frame
Number of butts littered globally
Butts in 1 cubic meter
Cubic meters of butts littered globally
Landmark
One minute
8,561,644
170,000
50
Olympic boxing ring
One day
12,328,767,123
170,000
72,522
Lincoln Memorial
One week
86,538,461,538
170,000
509,050
Two White Houses
One month
375,000,000,000
170,000
2,205,882
Capitol Building
One year*
4,500,000,000,000
170,000
26,470,588
Central Park
The world’s largest polluters
The Countries That Dispose of the Most Cigarette Butts
On average, Europeans dispose of 1,857 cigarette butts per year, making it the smokiest continent on the planet. Andorra is the smokiest country, where people dispose of over six thousand cig butts every year.
Not far behind is Luxembourg, smashing the six thousand ciggies mark and then some.
Country
Cigarette consumption per person per year
Cigarette consumption per person per day
Andorra
6,398
17.5
Luxembourg
6,331
17.3
Belarus
2,911
8.0
Macedonia, North
2,785
7.6
Albania
2,492
6.8
Belgium
2,441
6.7
Czech Republic
2,428
6.7
Jordan
2,306
6.3
Russia
2,295
6.3
Syria
2,292
6.3
Countries That Dispose of the Least Cigarette Butts
Africa is relatively smoke-free – people in Ghana dispose of an average of 41 cigarette butts per year.
Country
Cigarette consumption per person per year
Cigarette consumption per person per day
Brunei
10
0.0
Guinea-Bissau
25
0.1
Mauritania
30
0.1
Ghana
41
0.1
Antigua and Barbuda
89
0.2
India
89
0.2
Swaziland (Eswatini)
92
0.3
Ecuador
93
0.3
The Countries with the Highest and Lowest Smoking Rates
The Countries with the Highest Smoking Rates
Smoking rates are highest in Southeast Asia and Oceania. There are two countries on the continent where over half of the population are smokers – Kiribati (52.0%) and Nauru (52.1%).
Country
% of smokers in the adult population
Nauru
52.10%
Kiribati
52.00%
Tuvalu
48.70%
Myanmar
45.50%
Chile
44.70%
Lebanon
42.60%
Serbia
40.60%
Bangladesh
39.10%
Greece
39.10%
Bulgaria
38.90%
The Countries with the Lowest Smoking Rates
In contrast, smoking in Africa is relatively rare. In three countries, the smoking rate is less than 5% – Ghana (3.7%), Ethiopia (4.6%), and Nigeria (4.8%).
