SANTA CRUZ >> Santa Cruz County is on track to join rarified company when it comes to the fight against the physical and environmental impacts of cigarettes — filtered cigarettes, to be exact.

The recognizable, orange-ended smoking sticks are the target of a new ordinance that seeks to ban their sale in unincorporated territory, where half the county’s population lives. The ordinance, brought forward by Supervisors Justin Cummings and Manu Koenig, cleared a major hurdle Tuesday when it received a unanimous nod of approval from the county Board of Supervisors and was scheduled for a final draft vote at its Oct. 29 meeting.“Cigarette butts provide no health benefit to the smoker, they’re the most littered item on the planet, they’re poisonous to our environment,” said Koenig, moments before the vote. “Let’s ban this toxic trash.”

‘Time to be bold’

The ordinance, known by its “ban the butt” moniker among local advocates, does not prohibit the sale of all tobacco products or ban smoking of any tobacco product in designated areas, but instead attempts to get at the root of the specific issue of filtered cigarettes. The non-consumable orange ends, discarded after the tobacco has already gone up in smoke, have become ubiquitous along local beaches and waterways, which is problematic because they are composed of a plastic called cellulose acetate.

In addition to toxic chemicals such as arsenic and lead that leach out the filters as they break down, the plastic transforms into tiny bits of microplastics that get washed into the environment and wind up consumed by the local wildlife and, eventually, humans. Koenig and Cummings, who is an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and member of the powerful California Coastal Commission, have pointed to several scientific studies and media reports that have detected microplastics in a number of critical organs in the human body, including the brain, lungs, placentas, livers, kidneys and bone marrow, though the health impacts remain largely unknown.

Should the ordinance get a final green light at the end of the month, Santa Cruz County will become the only county in the nation that has banned the sale of filtered cigarettes specifically, Koenig told the Sentinel. According to Cummings, other regions in California, such as Manhattan Beach and Beverly Hills, have gone a step further and outlawed the sale of tobacco products altogether.

Katie Thompson, executive director of coastal advocacy nonprofit Save Our Shores, called cigarette butts the “singular most picked-up item” of trash in the region. She added that from 2013 to 2023, almost 500,000 of the orange nubs were grabbed from beaches, rivers and parks by volunteers throughout the Monterey Bay region, including Santa Cruz County — making up about one-third of all the plastic debris that was gathered.

“It is clear the littered butts are not going away despite numerous efforts to combat the problem,” said Thompson. “Now is the time to be bold.”

The ordinance comes from the work Koenig and Cummings did as members of the Tobacco Waste Ad Hoc Subcommittee, formed last May after the board passed a resolution — also adopted by the four other local jurisdictions — declaring tobacco waste a public health and environmental threat. The committee spent 16 months meeting with local residents and advocacy groups to fully understand the issue and determine how to best address it. Koenig explained that while aggressive litter abatement and increased tax fees have proven helpful in the past, the idea was to get directly at the root cause rather than staying perpetually stuck in a reactive stance.

Retailer pushback

While dozens of public speakers turned out to support the policy proposal, the ordinance also received strong pushback from several local retailers that said the ban would hit them hard in their pocketbooks. Felix Blanco, a 40-year county resident who owns two liquors stores in the area, said the issue is best addressed through public education and a redoubling of efforts to promote use of disposal bins.

“We’re not going to just be able to adjust like you’re saying,” said Blanco, adding that he helped collect signatures from more than 3,000 retail customers opposing the ban. “Some of us are going to go out of business.”

Jasmid Enciso, a representative from the National Association of Tobacco Outlets, added that while it supports efforts to reduce environmental harm, “this ordinance places an unnecessary burden on local businesses without effectively addressing the core issue.”

Koenig and Cummings, anticipating the economic concerns, drew comparisons to the county’s 2019 ban on flavored tobacco products. After a 3% decline in tobacco product sales tax revenue within the first six months of that ban, the supervisors argued that consumer habits adjusted, ultimately leading to an increase in tax revenue in the months and years that followed.

“Based on previous data, our thoughts are that the market will eventually stabilize over time as we observed with the flavored tobacco ban,” said Cummings. “We also should be thinking about the financial impacts to cleaning all this up.”

First in the pack

The meeting drew a broad swath of support from local advocates, surfers, environmental groups and public officials. Former county Supervisor and state Assemblymember Mark Stone was in attendance and said that similar filter bans failed at the state level on four occasions after they were derailed by the tobacco industry lobby.

“These are little toxic bombs that really should not be in the environment,” said Stone.

Should the ordinance receive the expected final approval on Oct. 29, it will technically take effect 31 days after adoption. But in an effort to give retailers a lengthy adjustment buffer, the monetary and licensing enforcement penalties won’t begin until Jan. 1, 2027, or when two other local jurisdictions pass similar prohibitions, whichever is later.

The supervisors, agreeing that the ordinance can only have so much impact if customers can simply step into neighboring jurisdictions to get filtered cigarettes, included an enforcement caveat involving neighboring cities, hoping that their ordinance will kickstart a paradigm shift in policy at the local, state and perhaps even national levels.

“Someone’s gotta go first,” Koenig told the Sentinel. “We hope that this will inspire many other cities, counties, even countries to take similar action to ban this toxic waste.”