News

For the study, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected cigarette butts, plant litter, and soil from 105 urban green spaces and 35 cities across China and analyzed them for the presence of ARGs and bacterial pathogens using shotgun metagenomic sequencing. They were interested in studying cigarette butts because they come into direct contact with the opportunistic and pathogenic bacteria within the smoker's oral cavity, are ubiquitous in the environment, and contain substances that can leach into the environment. The abundance of ARGs in cigarette butts was 1.24-fold higher than in plant litter and 1.48-fold higher than in soil, and also exceeded ARG levels found on other artificial surfaces, such as buildings. The researchers detected 95 potential pathogens in cigarette butts, which was twice as many as they found in plant litter and three times as many as in soil.