Surfers are rallying around the world to save sands and oceans that are under siege by plastic pollutants — an enthralling environmentalist movement beautifully captured by the filmmakers behind documentary The Cigarette Surfboard, which delighted and educated an audience during its California premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
Though the silent enemy washes ashore in many forms, one of the most common is mindlessly flicked by smokers — a small act adding up to such a big problem, that armies of volunteers regularly assemble to pick up thousands of toxic microplastic filters littering American coastlines.
There are so many, in fact, that Santa Cruz designer and surfer Taylor Lane decided to make functional surfboards out of the butts back in 2017. The project spawned an odyssey with director Ben Judkins to document Lane’s ambition to convince pro athletes to ride his “ciggyboard” as part of a larger effort to raise awareness of the issue.
“We thought it would be a short film,” Judkins said during a Q&A after screening his debut feature doc. “As we kept meeting with people, and as we kept learning more, we just realized there was a bigger story to tell, with this symbolism of the cigarette flick and all that that stands for. So, yeah, the more we dove in, the bigger story we realized we could tell.”
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To many of the surfers-turned-activists interviewed in The Cigarette Surboard, like singer Jack Johnson, the flick is a casual “fuck you” to both the planet that birthed the human race and the ocean that generously gives us over half of our clean air to breathe.
And no matter how many flicked butts are picked up, the onslaught will continue, keeping volunteers busy picking up Big Tobacco’s toxic trash “forever,” as one surfer notes in the film.
Cigarette Surfboard and the Start of Cigarettes’ Ocean Pollution Problem
San Diego State University School of Public Health professor Dr. Thomas Novotny traces the problem to the root: filters added to cigarettes in the 1930s and highly marketed in the 1960s to quell public health concerns over lung cancer linked to carcinogenic chemicals found in the addictive product.
Turns out, science has since proved filters aren’t all that effective and actually increase the risk of adenocarcinoma — cancer that forms in the glandular tissue — because smokers have to inhale harder, pulling the smoke and toxins deeper into the lungs. The toxins that the filters do collect are then released into the wild when the butts are flicked and decomposed by the elements.
Novotny, who was on hand to watch The Cigarette Surfboard for the first time at the festival, believes banning the sale of cigarettes with single-use, plastic filters would be the most effective way to eliminate this particular environmental threat. His guidance throughout the filmmaking process inspired Lane to rally the Santa Cruz surf community to petition the Santa Cruz City Council to pass the nation’s first-ever local ban. And by the time The Cigarette Surfboard finds distribution, the film may have a happy ending.
“Last week, these guys and I were at the Board of Supervisors meeting in Santa Cruz County, and they passed a ban on the sale of filtered cigarettes,” Novotny said at the screening, with Judkins adding a caveat: Despite the 5-0 unanimous vote of the board, an amendment adds more obstacles to the ban actually getting passed.
“Two other jurisdictions in Santa Cruz have to join along for this bill to come into effect,” Judkins explained. “However, there is a massive opportunity now for us to help get two other jurisdictions in Santa Cruz on board, and that’s what I want to share with you all tonight. If you happen to know anyone in Santa Cruz who might be interested in this issue and who could come along and attend city council meetings, or if you can attend via zoom, like we appreciate all the help we can get.”
If passed, Novotny believes the legislation “will be the tip of the spear” of a domino effect, motivating more municipalities, the state, and maybe the whole country to adopt similar legislation.
“There are some countries now that are considering it — Belgium and Netherlands — and the World Health Organization has recommended this intervention,” Novotny said. “So it’s, I think, going to happen sometime in my lifetime.”
Lane concluded with a call to action: “If you know a way that two broke surfers can go up against Big Tobacco, we should talk.”
“I think the narrative with our film was about making this a real-life journey; not just us, like, we’re not any more special than anybody else,” Lane continued. “This is a democracy where there’s a political process, and if people are concerned in their community about the environment or these issues, there is a voice for that to take place. And so for us, that’s happening.”
You can learn more about the Newport Beach Film Festival here, and more about The Cigarette Surfboard here,
Main image: Cigarette Surfboard.