Environmental activists in Portugal collected and stacked around 650,000 cigarette butts on Sunday in a square in central Lisbon during an action to raise awareness against this type of pollution.
“We asked everyone in Portugal to take part in this community project to draw attention to plastic pollution, since there is plastic hidden in cigarette butts and many people don’t know about it,” Andreas Noe, a 34-year-old German, told AFP. At the origin of this initiative.
He added that “One small butt is a great example of how everyone can start to take action, not just on cigarette butts and trash, but on ocean issues and ultimately the climate crisis.”
The NGOs and individuals who accepted the challenge collected enough cigarette butts in one week to fill about forty plastic beer barrels, and thus recycled them for a new use.
They then dumped their contents on a tarpaulin to make a mound on which Andreas Noy climbed, equipped with a breathing mask to protect himself from the toxic products of non-biodegradable cigarette butts.
This surf activist and enthusiast settled in Portugal six years ago, then gave up his career as a molecular biologist to devote himself to the environmental cause.
Two years ago, he had already collected about a million cigarette butts in two months.
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