What began with volcanic sand and discarded cigarette filters has taken No More Butts from local clean-ups to international policy discussions, making a future without cigarette filters feel within reach for the first time.
In 2019, I was sitting on Black Beach in Santorini, Greece, when I picked up a handful of volcanic sand and let it fall through my fingers. Expecting it to escape through my hand like sand through an hourglass, I noticed that amongst the grains of black sand were multiple white cigarette filters. The contrast was hard to ignore.
I had already been struck by the scale of plastic pollution after living and working in the Philippines for three years. Sitting on that beach, I was seeing another form of plastic that was used for minutes and then discarded, trillions of times a year. I told my friends I would do something about it. In 2020, that decision became No More Butts.
More than six years later, the idea that started with a handful of sand has grown into an international campaign to address cigarette filter pollution at its source. The goal is no longer simply to pick up cigarette butts; it is to challenge whether we need a filter at all.
The first step was to make people notice what they had learned to ignore.
Cigarette butts are small and familiar. They are also the most littered item on the planet, with the World Health Organization (WHO) estimating that around 4.5 trillion cigarette filters enter the environment every year.
After spending many days in the first year collecting butts alone and working with my local council to find solutions, I realised the response needed to scale. That led to the creation of the Big Butt Hunt. The idea was simple: people spend an hour searching their local streets, parks, or beaches for discarded cigarette butts, then count what they collect.
It is part clean-up, part community activity, and part revelation. A garden bed or park that looked relatively tidy can produce hundreds of cigarette butts once people start looking for them.
The hunts provided a practical way to remove existing pollution and highlight the enormity of the issue, but they raised more questions for me than they answered. I began to consider how to move from collecting litter to preventing the issue in the first place.
That question led us into an area that was less familiar to an environmental organisation. What purpose did the cigarette filter actually fulfil?
Almost all cigarette filters are made from cellulose acetate, a form of plastic. They are designed to be used once and discarded. Yet there is a widespread perception that filters make cigarettes safer.
To understand whether that perception was supported by evidence, I looked beyond the environmental sector and engaged with health professionals, scientists, and tobacco control experts. The evidence was clear: filters do not provide smokers with a proven health benefit.
We had started advocating for the removal of filters in our first year. The research, coupled with the WHO’s formal recommendation that policymakers consider banning cigarette filters as unnecessary single-use plastics, made the way forward much clearer.
From early on, our position became clear: an industry responsible for so much harm from the product it markets should not have a say in how it mitigates its environmental harm.
Cigarette filters are a unique product component. Removing them from a cigarette could eliminate a major source of single-use plastic pollution without removing a component that provides a proven health benefit to the user. We have an opportunity to prevent the waste through redesign rather than simply managing it after consumption.
Cigarette filters are designed to be used once, but their environmental impact lasts for decades. Photo by Cheryl Prestipino, courtesy of Cairns Regional Council.
Along with other organisations, No More Butts has brought the campaign to international policy discussions, including the Global Plastics Treaty process and international consultations on tobacco-related plastic pollution. But some of the most significant signs of progress have been much closer to home.
In Australia, cigarette filters have increasingly entered the conversation around plastics policy. At the Commonwealth level, cigarette butt waste has been included in Australia’s National Plastics Plan. The NSW Plastics Action Plan identified cigarette butt litter as a major source of plastic pollution and included action to tackle it. The issue has also appeared in South Australian parliamentary debate and, in 2026, cigarette filters were included among the single-use plastic products considered in the ACT Government’s consultation on further plastic reduction.
The same shift is happening internationally. In 2026, the UK Tobacco and Vapes Bill became the subject of parliamentary amendments proposing powers and measures relating to cigarette filters, including proposals to prohibit the supply of plastic filters.
These processes are different in scope and outcome, but together they show how far the conversation has moved. A product that was once largely treated as a litter-management issue is increasingly being considered through the broader lens of plastic pollution, product design and public health.
There is still plenty of work to do. Existing cigarette butt pollution will not disappear overnight, and a phase-out will require careful policy design. The evidence will continue to matter, and governments will need to decide what action is appropriate.
But the progress since I sat on that beach is measurable. It can be felt. At the beginning, the problem was only visible because I happened to look closely at a handful of black sand. My response was to pick up what was already there and show other people what they were walking past. The ambition has since moved upstream.
Clean-ups still play a role. They protect the environment today and help communities understand the problem. But the long-term goal must be different. It has to be a world with no cigarette filters to pick up.
That possibility feels very different now from how it did in 2019. The idea is being considered in parliaments, government consultations and international policy forums. Researchers and health professionals are adding to the evidence base and environmental organisations are increasingly looking at tobacco waste as part of the wider plastic pollution problem.
What began with me filtering sand through my fingers has become a campaign to see cigarette filters removed at the source. For the first time, a path towards the end of the problem is starting to come into view.
