2018 CA Trash Data Dive

Quantifying Water Quality Impacts of Tobacco in Litter

Author: Walter Yu, P.E.

Abstract

The State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) is in process of adopting its Trash Amendments which prohibit trash discharge to Waters of the State to minimize environmental impacts. One major component of trash is cigarette butts and tobacco products which are a form of non-biodegradable litter. In addition, this litter contains tobacco which may lead to health impacts when incorporated into discharged runoff. The National Institute of Health (NIH) published an article in 2009 which outlines these impacts and recommendations for reducing them. As a result, this study evaluates methods to quantify potential water quality and health impacts of tobacco incorporated into litter.

Introduction

This study was developed as part of the 2018 CA Trash Data Dive which was organized by the SWRCB and hosted by the San Francisco Estuary Institute. It analyzes trash characterization data from the Bay Area Stormwater Management Agencies Association (BASMAA) street sweeping and curb inlet screen evaluation study and the CalEnviroScreen dataset provided by the CA Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA).

Quantifying the impacts of tobacco in litter would help with develop public policy and shifting public opinion, so this study address the questions listed below with data analysis and visualization:

1. Which publicly available datasets would be useful in quantifying water quality impacts?
2. If so, then what are some effective methods for analyzing them?
3. What are some observations and next steps from this study?

Data Analysis

The BASMAA and CalEnviroScreen datasets were analyzed and visualized in Google Earth as follows:

1. BASMAA Trash Characterization: Dataset includes cigarette butt volume collected at 3 monitoring sites in 2015; as a result, the site locations and volume data were summarized for analysis.
2. CalEPA CalEnviroScreen: Dataset includes potential health impacts due to groundwater and drinking water risk; as a result, scores within the same zipcode as the BASMAA monitoring sites were summarized for analysis.
3. BASMAA and CalEnviroScreen Visualization: Both datasets were compared in Google Earth to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach to quantifying water quality impacts.

Tools and Process

The tools and process listed below were used to analyze data and provide recommendations:

1. Excel and CSV Files - Exploratory data analysis and data cleaning were completed in Excel and CSV.
2. Google Earth - Data visualization was completed by importing BASMAA and CalEnviroScreen CSV data.
3. Machine Learning (Next Step) - Additional analysis may be used to compare data features.

Installation

Clone Github repository, then open KMZ file with Google Earth Desktop.