Even though smoking is not fashionable these days, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts end up harming the environment each year. According to data from the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (Miteco), 80% of fires were intentional or the result of some type of negligence or accident, and 3% of forest fires are from abandoned cigarette butts or ones thrown from a vehicle. They also pose another environmental problem, as they take several years to disappear.
To solve this problem of contamination, Edwin Bos and Martijn Lukaart, co-founders of TechTics, devised a prototype vehicle called BeachBot which is capable of detecting cigarette butts, removing them from the sand and discarding them in a safe container. An idea that arose from seeing the amount of cigarettes that they found discarded on the Dutch beach of Scheveningen.
This electric vehicle does not leave any marks in the sand thanks to its special tyres, and has a processor that uses image detection software to identify the butts and then collect them with a kind of comb. These are then stored in the onboard compartment for disposal.
Anyone can connect with BeachBot and make it smarter by training their image detection algorithm with photos of cigarette butts, and to help collect the photos, the BeachBot team turned to Microsoft Trove, an application that connects AI developers with photographers.
Thanks to the team's efforts, Scheveningen Beach, the beach where BeachBot completed its first demonstration, is becoming a cleaner coastal area, so let’s hope he can be deployed on beaches in the Canary Islands to not only clean them up, but also help protect the environment.
Discarding cigarette butts in Spain is a punishable offence:
In Spain, under current legislation, it is classed as a ‘minor offense’ to leave, dump or discard objects or materials of any kind in public, and is punishable with fines ranging from 198 to 3,800 euros. So, if a cigarette butt is thrown from a car window an infraction is being committed. In the event that these types of acts affect the state of the road, the offence will be considered ‘serious’ and punishable by fines ranging from 3,800 to almost 9,800 euros.
In addition, if throwing out a cigarette butt causes a forest fire, the culprits can face a prison term of three to six years. Fire is one of the biggest dangers caused by rubbish in gutters: badly extinguished cigarette butts pose a direct risk of fire, and the remnants of glass can accumulate light at one point, causing a "magnifying glass effect" that starts the fire.
