green facts

did you know that cigarette butts take more than 7 years to decompose AND that just one such butt pollutes about 500 litres of water or 1 cubic metre of snow with toxic substances such as tar, quicksilver and something we in French call 'chlorure de vinyle' (which, no matter how translated, is definitely bad)?

other decomposition times (as written in the newspaper i read yesterday - i haven't actually checked, so if there's a mistake somewhere, please let me know!):
- a glass bottle: around 4000 years
- a ski-pass: 1000 years
- chewing-gum: 500 years
- a plastic bag: 450 years
- an aluminium can: 200 years
- a lighter: 100 years
- candy wrapper: 5 years
- a but ticket (in Switzerland): 1 year
- a pack of cigarettes: 6 months
- a matchstick: 6 months
- a paper tissue: 3 months
- a banana peel: 1 month

time to take stock and stop throwing things on the streets, in fields or forests, or anywhere that's not a bin, really!