Smoking is not only harmful to your health but also has a huge impact on the environment. Every time you smoke a cigarette, chemicals are released into the atmosphere, polluting the air. But this is far from the only way that cigarettes harm the environment.
Annually, about 6 trillion cigarettes are produced in the world, with up to 680 million tons of cigarette butts falling into the environment.
It's time to realize that cigarette butts are the same trash as a plastic bottle or ice-cream wrapper. Throwing them in the hatch, out of the car window, or leaving on the beach is unacceptable, but for some reason, in society, such actions are still not perceived as something wrong. Quitting smoking is definitely very difficult; however, if people call drug addiction help hotline at AddictionResource, smoking harm can be reduced.
Cigarette butts are the most commonly discarded garbage in the world and a major coastal pollutant. According to the results of public inspections of plastic pollution, cigarette butts accounted for almost 30% of all collected disposable plastic.
According to a study in Washington, the majority of smokers (74.1%) at least once threw a cigarette butt onto the ground or from a car window.
Cigarette butts contain plastic
Most often, cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate - this is a type of plastic. They need about 20 years to decompose, not to completely disappear but become microplastic. We will stop seeing it, but it will remain in the water, mix with the sand, and may fall on our plates through the food chain.
In the USA, cellulose acetate filters have learned to recycle and make benches out of them. But this is not a solution to the problem, but a struggle with the investigation - we do not need so many benches, which in the end will still go to landfill.
Cigarettes contain hazardous substances
The composition of tobacco resins, which are deposited on a cellulose acetate cigarette filter, includes more than 3.5 thousand chemicals, many of them are toxic to fish, and it is also a carcinogen for humans. Poisonous substances contain aluminum, bromine, chromium, copper, iron, lead, manganese, nickel, strontium, titanium, zinc, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, and are easily washed with water and pollute the soil and water.
The results of the experiments showed that chemical compounds from cigarette filters are deadly for Daphnia (small crustaceans): one and a half cigarette butts in a liter of water is enough for all living organisms to die there in 48 hours.
Cigarette production affects climate change
Production of tons of cellulose acetate results in 1.4 tons of greenhouse gases in CO2 equivalent. In the US, approximately 44 thousand tons of garbage are formed in the form of cigarette filters every year. It turns out that the production of filters alone leads to annual emissions of more than 61 million tons of greenhouse gases, which is equal to the annual carbon footprint of 15,400 people (the average human carbon footprint is equal to four thousand tons of carbon dioxide per year).
The annual tobacco production provides nearly 84 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions: this is equal to the emissions of Peru or Israel per year.
What to do?
In the US, the fight against smoking is mainly focused on the establishment of zones where this can or cannot be done. At the same time, the global industry continues to produce billions of cigarettes, and it is unlikely that the ban on smoking on airplanes or rehab hotlines can stop it.
On May 1, World No Tobacco Day, the World Health Organization (WHO) presented its report on how cigarette smoking affects the global environment.
World No Tobacco Day, listed on UN World and International Days, was officially proclaimed by WHO in 1988. Its theme for 2017, formulated as "Tobacco is a threat to development," aims to draw the attention of the world community to the global consequences of smoking and "step up tobacco control efforts as part of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Agenda until 2030 year. "According to the World Health Organization, "tobacco control can break the cycle of poverty, help eradicate hunger, promote sustainable agriculture and economic growth, and tackle climate change."
The 72-page report of Tobacco and Its Environmental Impact: An Overview includes information from scientists from the United States, Canada, Germany, and Australia.
There are some interesting facts from this study and the WHO press release on World No Tobacco Day.
Tobacco kills more than 7 million people a year and is the largest preventable cause of death. In 2012, around 967 million world smokers consumed 6.25 trillion cigarettes per year.
About 80% of premature deaths from tobacco use occur in low- and middle-income countries.
Each year, 11.4 million metric tons of wood are spent only on drying tobacco (as fuel), excluding the additional costs of producing cigarette paper and packaging for final products.
Only for drying tobacco leaves for every 300 cigarettes produced in the world, one tree is burned.
For the cultivation of tobacco, 4.3 million hectares of land are used annually, representing 2 to 4% of global deforestation.
About ten times more cigarettes are smoked in China than in any other country. China National Tobacco Company (CNTC) produces about 44% of all cigarettes consumed in the world but does not have publicly available reports on its environmental impact.
The total annual energy consumption of tobacco companies is equivalent to the construction of about 2 million cars.
Each year, tobacco smoking brings into the atmosphere 3-6 thousand metric tons of formaldehyde, 17-47 thousand metric tons of nicotine, 3-5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
To address these problems, the World Health Organization offers its WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, originally adopted back in 2003. Its fifth part is fully devoted to environmental protection and includes measures such as the mandatory provision by tobacco companies of detailed environmental reports, protecting people from tobacco smoke, regulating the contents of tobacco products, improving literacy regarding the effects of smoking, prohibitions on advertising tobacco products, introducing liability for tobacco companies for the environmental consequences of their activities, etc.
But the best option is probably to call an addiction hotline and quit smoking and not harm either yourself or nature. By buying cigarettes, we create demand for new production, which means we support a dirty industry.
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