House passes bill allowing cities to decide whether people can smoke at the beach

JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. — No more smoking on the beach? Many say, it’s about time.

The Florida Senate has its own version—SB 224—which would provide exemptions for cigars that do not contain filters or plastic tips and pipe tobacco.

Now, both chambers will have to agree on a bill to move forward. The goal is to potentially prevent cigarette butts from ending up at our local beaches.

“This bill is not banning,” explained Kassidy Kinkle with Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit which helped lobby support in favor of the bill. “It is giving us the option to ban it in the future..it is very exciting,” she said.

So what’s the biggest problem with a cigarette butt?

“It is a carcinogen,” Kinkle explained. “They’re not going to biodegrade.”

And they’re everywhere, as local woman Nicole Miller will tell you. She was in Jacksonville Beach doing a clean-up with friends Friday morning. As she held up her right hand, covered in a clear glove, she explained, “this glove is PPE for cigarettes. They’re a major concern.”

She went on to say, “it could take years and years, hundreds of years for the styrofoam within the cigarettes to biodegrade, and by then, maybe a bird has consumed it or it really finds its way into our environment in turn into the fish that we maybe even consume.”

But it’s not just the locals she’s thinking about. It’s tourists, like Tom Malloy.

“There are so many people that come to Florida for their beaches. Coming from San Diego, California, you can’t smoke on the beach,” Malloy said.

And he believes environmentalists could further their mission of cleaning up beaches even more, with the help of this proposal. “Instead of picking up cigarette butts, maybe there’s other plastics they could pick up,” he said.

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