Abstract
Monthly monitoring of disposable lighter washed up on the beaches of Tottori, Japan, was carried out from April 2004 to December 2010. Detailed information from the lighters, including addresses and phone numbers, was used to determine specific locations of the origins. A total of 27,968 lighters were collected, of which 6.1%, 10.8% and 10.3% originated from Japan, Korea, and China-Taiwan, respectively. These proportions of lighter origins are very different from the proportions of PET bottle origins based on the monitoring simultaneously with the lighters, because the consumption of the lighters printed with characters is different in the respective regions. On the comparison in limited areas, the detailed address information of lighters is very useful. On the basis of the ascertainment of a few disorders of addresses caused by people coming and going, it is indicated that the lighters from western Korea and southern Kyushu are rarely drift into the Sea of Japan and floating lighters rarely drift from coastal zones into the open sea and rarely drift against the Tsushima Current. These results suggest that the effectiveness of local measures to reduce the consumer wastes into the sea could be evaluated by monitoring the origins of disposable lighter on beaches.
