Cigarettes Aren’t Just Bad for Your Lungs – They Hurt the Environment, Too
July 20, 2008 · Print This Article
Cigarettes are bad, mmkay? Of course, you already know that. You’re bombarded with it practically every day due to the last decade or so of efforts to educate the public about how harmful cigarettes are. That doesn’t stop most of you from doing it, though. Chances are, if you’re a smoker, you choose to ignore it and go about your daily cigarette-smoking life – because it’s your life, right? Sound familiar? Well, if you care about the environment, perhaps you should rethink your ‘it’s my decision’ stance.
From Simran Sethi’s ‘Life Cycle: Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em’ on The Huffington Post:
Our little tobacco friends begin, as do so many things, in a field within a warm climate, where tobacco plants are doused with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Once harvested by many hands–sometimes those of a child–the leaves are dried and cured for upwards of three years and finally shipped from the company farm to the company producer. That’s when the fun stuff gets added. The same ammonia that cleans your toilet helps your brain absorb nicotine more quickly. A chemical similar to rocket fuel keeps the tip of the cigarette burning efficiently. A little formaldehyde here, a little fungicide there. By the time leaves are cut down to size, adorned with filters, nestled in foil and wrapped in cellophane, one carton of cigarettes has wreaked a lot of havoc.
Deforestation is the most direct environmental repercussion of the approximately ten gazillion cigarettes smoked in the world daily. Wood is used just about every step in production–to cure tobacco, to wrap the leaves with paper, to box them up with cardboard. A cigarette manufacturing machine produces up to 14,000 smokes a minute, blowing through four miles of paper every hour. For every 300 cigarettes, one tree is consumed.
Of course, that’s not all – tobacco production in developing countries uses child labor and causes food shortages by diverting farmland usage. All those butts also end up in the landfill where they take at least 25 years to decompose.
Not enough reason to quit? Simran recommends trying rolling your own cigarettes, which will reduce waste and the amount of chemicals you inhale (but won’t help your lungs). Or, you could try a brand without additives like American Spirit. Or, you know, you could just quit. I’m just sayin’.
Link [The Huffington Post]
Photo credit: Flickr user SuperFantastic
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to add the long list here of reasons it’s bad - is cigarette butt litter is a huge problem too!
Oh dear, was just recently considering how to quit smoking again but who knew?
I’m sorry, but I was apalled to read this story. Simran is a very dear person, but how can she write this, how can she be an environmental activist, a leader in the environmental field, when she SMOKES herself…and polluting the environment with each puff she takes … and also contributing, as she writes, to the child labor problem in developing countries. I’m sorry, but the truth must come out and the readers must know. This is hypocrisy in every word she writes.
/SIgh I wish when people put an article out that says “Cigarettes Aren’t Just Bad for Your Lungs – They Hurt the Environment, Too” They would actually talk about how it scientifically hurts the environment instead of stupid little kids in asia pciking the shit for us to smoke. So they kill one tree for 300 cigs. so what? Please next time talk about how it degrades buildings and kills trees with the particulate matter or something. shit…