Need yet another reason to quit smoking? What about the environment? All the stages of smoking cigars and cigarettes – manufacturing, smoking, and discarding – are bad for the environment. If you’re a smoker, there are ways you can minimize some of the harmful effects for the environment, although you can’t reduce it entirely. To make matters worse, worldwide, smoking is actually on the rise.1 Because of this, cities and governments around the world are starting to create laws to ban smoking—not just to protect smokers and those around them, but to protect the environment.
The first environmental problem with smoking is the process required to make cigars and cigarettes. In the United States, tobacco, a plant relatively sensitive to disease, requires the use of more pesticides per acre than most other crops, amounting to 27 million pounds of pesticides each year. While this is bad for the environment, the situation is even worse in developing countries, where 85% of the world’s tobacco is grown. There, the most popular way to dry out tobacco is to burn wood found in the forest. One study estimated that tobacco farming is responsible for about 1.7% of the loss of worldwide forest cover. Fortunately, the manufacturing process of tobacco can be “greened.” For eco-friendly smokers, there is a brand called American Spirit, which sells USDA certified organic tobacco using sustainable farming methods.
The second environmental problem with smoking is the smoke itself, which is a type of air pollution. Tobacco cigarettes, including organic, low tar, and non-methol ones, produce around 14 milligrams of fine particulate matter per cigarette. It may not sound like much, but globally, smokers are producing equivalent to around half a year of emissions from all on-road vehicles in the United States.2 Although it is perceived as less harmful to the environment, cigar smoke is just as harmful, if not more so, than cigarette smoke. This is because it has such high concentrations chemicals, takes longer to smoke, and lingers in the air longer than cigarette smoke.3 For eco-friendly smokers, there is a cigarette-replacement product called the Eclipse, which uses charcoal to heat, and not burn, tobacco. It produces 86-90% less particulate matter, which makes it better for the environment, but not necessarily for your health.4
The third environmental problem is discarded cigarette butts. Worldwide, 14.5 trillion cigarette butts end up as litter each year. That’s a huge amount of trash.5 In fact, 30% of the waste found on U.S. land, waterways, and shorelines are made up of cigarette butts. Cities which impose an indoor smoking ban to prevent the harmful effects of secondhand smoke are inadvertently exacerbating the problem by letting smokers litter their cigarette butts outdoors on the ground.6 Unfortunately, cigarettes aren’t biodegradable. Even worse, after 10-15 years, the fibers only break down into their toxic components, like nicotine, benzene, heavy metals, and other carcinogens, poisons, and hazardous chemicals. These chemicals pollute waterways, and even the water supply.
Cigarette butts aren’t only toxic for the environment, but a general safety hazard. Tossed cigarette butts are a major fire hazard, and are one of the top causes of forest fires. Discarded butts around playgrounds or the beach are especially dangerous, since dogs and little kids tend to find them and put them in their mouths, ingesting toxins. For eco-friendly smokers, there is the Keol portable, reusable ashtray which you can use to snub out and carry away your cigarette butts.
In Chicago, the city government has decided to take a stand against polluting cigarette butts. Anyone who smokes or throws away a cigarette within 15 feet of a beach will be fined $500. Their reason for doing so is mostly because of the litter problem—even though there are both sanitation workers and volunteer cleanup crews trying to pick up the butts, they still can’t pick them all up. What about sidewalks? Apparently, the city already has an ordinance which prohibits tossing cigarette butts from a moving car on onto a public sidewalk.7
In many cities around the world, there seems to be a trend of smoking bans for an environmental reason. San Francisco has imposed a 0.33 cent tax on each pack of cigarettes sold in the city to help pay for the cost of cleaning up the cigarette butts.8 Bondi Beach, a popular beach in Sydney, Australia, has banned smoking altogether in an effort to prevent the cigarette butts from being eaten by the whales, fish, and birds in the ocean.9 In Dublin, Ireland, a ban on smoking has been shown to reduce air pollution by 83% and reduce the presence of carcinogenic particles by 80%, a dramatic difference seen only within a span of a few years.10
The evidence is overwhelming that smoking is bad for the environment. The best thing that smokers out there can do to “go green” is to quit smoking. But, even if you can’t quit smoking entirely, just taking a few steps to reduce your impact can go a long way in helping the environment.
