SYRACUSE — On Sept. 30, Kosciusko County Tobacco Free Youth Coalition members conducted a Waste Tobacco Filters event in downtown Syracuse.

They worked in partnership with the Syracuse-Wawasee Chamber of Commerce.

According to a 2011 The Tax Burden on Tobacco report, Americans purchased more than 287 billion cigarettes. A vast number of those cigarette butts, including the filters, will be flicked into the environment, landing along waterways, parks, beaches and public roads.

The Kosciusko County Tobacco Free Youth Coalition is working to raise awareness about the negative impact cigarette filters and discarded cigarette butts have on the environment. Cigarette butts contain heavy metals that can leach into waterways, posing a lethal threat to aquatic life. They are costly to local communities to clean up and dispose of, as well, said a news release from the tobacco coalition.

According to environmental cleanup reports, nearly two million cigarettes or cigarette filters/butts were picked up internationally from beaches and inland waterways as part of the annual International Coastal Cleanup in 2010, including more than one million from the United States alone. Cigarette butts account for more than three times the number of any other item found over the past 25 years of ICC cleanups. Research shows that cigarette butts have potentially toxic effects on ecosystems. In one laboratory test, just one cigarette butt soaked in a liter of water was lethal to half of the fish exposed.

Cigarette butts are made mostly of plastic, which can take years to decompose in the marine environment. While a majority of the respondents surveyed nationally (78 percent) know that cigarette butts are not typically biodegradable and recognize their toxicity (89 percent), tobacco products are still the most prevalent type of litter collected along U.S. roadways and on beaches. These toxic pieces of trash are only biodegradable under ideal conditions and in real-world conditions, they merely break up into small particles of plastic.