During the quarantine my back patio with a great view of the woods kept the insanity of not being able to leave my house at bay. Unfortunately, when I'm sitting outside listening to birds chirp and staring at some leaves, I often catch a whiff of bitter smoke. I look around and sure enough it's one of my neighbors smoking. Since I have truly brilliant luck, nearly every single one of my neighbors in apartments next to mine smoke. This fact had been apparent since the time I found a cigarette butt the guy upstairs had dropped on our poor cactus. I was aware of the horrifying effects of smoking on the human body (Tobacco use, especially cigarette smoking, is the most preventable cause of death in the United States) but as I stared at the cigarette butt in my cactus I wondered how bad smoking is for the environment. Spoiler: it's bad, really bad.
Cigarette butts are the world’s most littered plastic item. Let that horrifying fact sink in...like the nicotine, heavy metals, and many other chemicals sink into the surrounding environment after these butts are casually discarded. For starters, smoking causes air pollution by releasing toxic air pollutants into the atmosphere. The cigarette butts also litter the environment and the toxic chemicals in the remains seep into soils and waterways therefore causing soil and water pollution respectively. A recent study found that cigarette butts inhibit plant growth. They also routinely get into waterways, and eventually oceans. Animals and plants that come into contact or absorb the toxic substances from the cigarette residues are affected. What makes these consequences worse is the sheer number of smokers and therefore cigarette butts discarded. Smokers around the world buy roughly 6.5 trillion cigarettes each year. That’s 18 billion every day. While most of a cigarette’s innards and paper wrapping disintegrate when smoked, not everything gets burned. Trillions of cigarette filters—also known as butts or ends—are left over, only an estimated third of which make it into the trash. E-cigarettes are just as bad if not worse, containing more plastic and the same toxic chemicals.
While the effects of smoking and the consequent littering of cigarettes are bad enough on their own, the utter dumpster fire that is the tobacco industry adds to the horrible environmental effect.
Frequently, tobacco farmers clear the forest by burning it; often, the land is abandoned, contributing in many cases to desertification. Not only does this slash-and-burn agriculture generate vast amounts of pollutants, much of this land is cleared of carbon dioxide-absorbing forest cover. As a result, tobacco cultivation is exacerbating greenhouse gas levels.Tobacco is one of the most chemically-intensive crops. Most farmers heavily use inorganic chemical fertilizers to promote growth and herbicides to mitigate competing weeds. Because tobacco is typically grown as a monocrop, it is also particularly vulnerable to pests and most farmers heavily use pesticides. Furthermore, in most tobacco producing countries (primarily developing nations such as India, Brazil and China), there is evidence that farmers continue to use chemicals that are restricted or banned in most higher-HDI regions, such as the European Union. The tobacco product manufacturing process generates vast amounts of waste. The last rigorous estimate, from 1995, suggested that the industry produces more than 2.5 million tonnes of manufacturing waste, much of which contains nicotine and other dangerous chemicals. As global tobacco production is currently greater than in 1995, this negative impact can only be higher still today.
This graphic summarises the terrible effect of cigarettes and the larger tobacco industry on the environment pretty well.
To alleviate the horrifying environmental impact of tobacco products the following solutions have been proposed. First, there are steps you can take on an individual level: don't smoke and spread awareness on the environmental degradation that cigarettes can cause. Assist in cleanup efforts to help remove cigarette butts and prevent them from leaching chemicals into the ground. However these practices can only do so much, on a legislative level one solution would be to ban cigarette filters i.e the cigarette butts or introduce biodegradable cigarette filters. Unfortunately, consumers don't want to buy cigarettes without filters causing companies to hesitate on alternatives to the harmful plastic filters. A way to tackle e-cig waste would be a deposit system i.e you exchange your old cartridges for new ones which juul is considering.
What are some more ways we could reduce the impact of smoking and cigarettes? Do you know someone/someone who smokes? Do you think public awareness of the environmental effects of tobacco will reduce smoking? Are companies responsible for introducing environmentally sustainable disposal programs?
