Summer is almost here and although we all have the image of idyllic beaches with fine clean sand, every summer reality intrudes and we find cigarette butts everywhere. Even though many beaches have banned smoking and there are signs everywhere telling people not to litter, summer after summer the same problems arise, and it is not just unfair and gross to other beach goers, it is also highly contaminant for the environment. That is why beaches in Spain are trying to use new technology to get rid of these unwanted byproducts, and the answer seems to have come in the form of a robot, VERO, that operates thanks to Artificial Intelligence.
One of the saddest statistics, especially considering how bad cigarettes have been proven to be time and time again, is that cigarette butts are actually the most common form of litter on the planet. Out of the six trillion cigarettes smoked around the world every year, nearly 4.5 trillion end up scattered in the environment. And they are not compostable, each one takes about 12 years on average to decompose, and they leak out a lot of toxic chemicals like nicotine, pesticides, tar, heavy metals and more while they do it.
Another sad truth is that most of these butts end up in the ocean and the statistics are not pretty. According to Greenpeace, 70% of the trash that enters the sea sinks straight to the bottom, 15% floats in the water, and the rest washes back up onto the coastlines, so for every disgusting thing you see at the beach, there is plenty more that you cannot even begin to understand in the bottom of the ocean.
And the impact of human life cannot be understated. The World Health Organization says the tobacco industry is behind more than 8 million deaths each year, cuts down 600 million trees and uses 22 billion tons of water. All of this has an enormous impact on the environment and our lives, especially when we add the pollution that they produce, 84 million tons of CO2 released.
Despite all initiatives to improve the situation and help people stop smoking and clean up the industry to at least make it less contaminant, the problem is not slowing down, and production is expected to hit 9 trillion cigarettes by 2025.
The solution that will hopefully help Spain get rid of cigarette butts in their beaches
It comes from Italy, another one of the countries that have a huge issue with their beaches being contaminated. There, a group of researchers have developed a new tool to help, a little robot called VERO, which walks on four legs like a dog and is designed specifically to sniff out cigarette butts on beaches, where normal machines cannot really do much. Fitted with cameras and smart detection systems, each leg has a suction mechanism that lets it vacuum up butts it spots in the sand. It can also pick up on bigger pieces of trash and signal human workers to handle those, which makes it the perfect aid for workers that have this thankless task.
Claudio Semini, one of the minds behind the project at the Italian Institute of Technology stated (translated) “VERO was born out of the frustration of seeing people throwing cigarette butts on the beach. It can distinguish them from other objects and access difficult places”
In places like Spain, where about 5 billion cigarette butts get dumped on beaches every year, tools like VERO could be game-changers, as cigarette butts make up nearly 40% of all urban litter there, and cleaning it up costs local governments a lot of money and manpower.