Presentation of the challenge, why are we doing that? 

During the year, the Erasmus group has to do many different solidarity actions and actions for the environment, so we had the idea to do the #FillTheBottleChallenge in our neighborhood. The challenge consists in collecting the butts that we found and then put them in bottles. The goal of this challenge is to gather as much cigarettes as we can in front of our high school and in front of the train station to give them to an association named Greenminded. 

This association is recycling them by separating the different parts and substances of the cigarettes. Then they are turning them into furniture. They also offer accessible collections and recycling solutions for any actor wishing to engage in an eco-responsible approach to managing this waste.  

Carry out this environmental action is very important because cigarette butts are one of the most common causes of lands and seas pollution. This problem concerns us all and this is why we have to act: because we just have one planet so we must take care of it. 

Informations about cigarettes: pollution and trashes 

*In the world, cigarette butts are one of the most common causes of pollution. On average, we would throw away at least 137 000 cigarette butts per second, that is to say 4 300 billion cigarette butts per year. 

*Cigarettes are the first cause of seas and oceans pollution: 1 cigarette butt pollutes 500 liters of water! 

*Moreover, 1 cigarette butt is composed of 2 500 chemical components and it would need about 15 years to degrade. Plus, it’s the third trash which pollutes the most on Earth. 

*16% of the cigarette butts are responsible of the starts of fires. *This garbage would represent at least ⅓ of the trashes on the ground. 

*In France, we risk a fine of 68 euros if we throw a cigarette on the ground. And in our country, there is about 40 to 70 billion of cigarette butts that are thrown away per year. 

*All those numbers are showing us how much we pollute this planet (which is our ONLY planet) so there is just one thing we have to do: to protect and take care of our planet by doing the kind of action we’re going to do.  

Realization of the challenge: its different stapes and its results 

*On Friday December the 20th, we made the challenge and we started at 12:40. We took empty bottles to put the cigarettes in them and we were 12 students and one adult to do the challenge. We began to gather the cigarette butts in front of our high school and we saw that there were a lot of cigarettes even though there are many trashcans in front of the school. 

*We spend about 45 minutes to gather the cigarettes in front of our high school so at 1:20 p.m. we left the school to go to the train station. We stopped many times on the way to pick the cigarettes up and we saw that the place where there was the biggest number of cigarettes was in front of bars and especially bars that didn't have any ashtrays. When we arrived at the train station our bottles were half full and a little bottle was totally full. We found a lot of cigarettes in front of the train station: close to the bus stop, on the square, in the driveway from the garage be ground. At 2:15 p.m. we started to come back to the high school, our 5 big bottles were almost full ( we are going to fill them with the little bottle) when we came back in front of the bar in the main street we saw that some people had thrown their cigarettes on the ground. We came back at 14:30 by a different way and we saw that we actually did a very good work. 

*During this challenge, we saw that people can really be disrespectful into the environment and we saw how much cigarettes people are throwing on the ground even day and everywhere. The fact that we can recycle those things is just amazing because cigarettes are dangerous for us and for the environment.  

An article by Audrey