Cigarettes Aren’t Just Bad for Your Lungs – They Hurt the Environment, Too

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

Who’s Who in Green: Simran Sethi

This week’s Who’s Who in Green puts the spotlight on Simran Sethi, an award-winning environmental journalist who has appeared on the Sundance Channel, the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Ellen Degeneres Show, the Today Show and the Martha Stewart Show. Simran is one busy woman, with tons of green cred for all the work she’s done calling attention to environmental issues.

Born in 1970 in Germany and raised in North Carolina with Indian heritage, Simran has a list longer than her arm of astonishing career accomplishments as a freelance environmental journalist and has received many awards and recognition for her work.

Simran is a contributing environmental correspondent at NBC News and is currently writing a book on environmental justice for Harper Collins. She’s also the contributing author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, which won the bronze 2008 Axiom Award for Best Business Ethics book. She’s also NYU’s inaugural Goddard Fellow, Associate Fellow at the Asia Society, and is the Lacy C. Haynes Visiting Professional Chair at the University of Kansas School of Journalism, where she’s currently teaching a course on Media and the Environment.

You may recognize Simran from her many media appearances, her work with Treehugger or our own Top 25 Hottest Girls in Green feature. She’s the co-host/writer for the Sundance Channel’s environmental programming The Green, and is also a featured commentator for Big Ideas for a Small Planet. She anchors the Sundance interstitial business series EcoBiz and creator of the Sundance web series The Good Fight, which highlights global environmental justice efforts. She also hosts the Emmy-award winning PBS production A School in the Wood, which highlights environmental education efforts on Bainbridge Island. As part of the Treehugger team, Simran co-hosted, created and oversaw all video and audio content. She also writes regularly for The Huffington Post.

She was also honored with hosting duties at a forum on global warming with Al Gore, and moderated a panel on climate change at the first Clinton Global Initiative University. Other hosting credits include the podcast for the Alliance for Climate Protection, The EcoZone Project, and the series Keep it Green on Equator HD. She has produced documentaries for MTV News in the U.S., anchored news for MTV Asia and oversaw the MTV India News division. Simran also has her own production company, SHE TV.

Simran was celebrated for her environmental work in the 2007 Vanity Fair green issue, and Variety magazine recognized her as a ‘Woman of Impact’. She was also named one of the top Eco-Heroes of the Planet by the UK’s Independent.

While it’s hard to imagine how Simran finds the time for all of this work, she still feels as if she isn’t doing enough. Of what keeps her up at night, Simran told the Whole Life Times,

“Daily, I worry about being conscious of what I eat and how I live and what I buy. But I also want to have a macro focus, and sometimes I don’t know how to do both — looking beyond just me, and my world and how I consume. How can I, how can we work toward shifting the paradigm so there is greater equity across communities, across countries? That’s the part I don’t feel I’ve fully connected to yet. Because so far we’ve mostly focused on how to consume differently — which I think is a great entry point for people — but I’m also impatient to go further. How do we re-envision our world? That’s what I want to get to. I think the environmental justice movement is a key component of that, and that’s my goal in terms of self-education and the kind of organizations I want to promote, making sure they’re moving towards looking at environmentalism as a human rights issue. So what keeps me up at night is — did I do enough of it today? And where am I going to find time to do more, because I want to talk about all of these stories.”

What Simran’s basic goal comes down to is bringing environmentalism to the people, highlighting the fact that everyone has to start somewhere – so no matter how humble your initial foray into eco-friendliness might be, it’s still big – it’s a gift to the world. Simran wants everyone to consider how small daily actions, like using reusable cups instead of disposable ones, can cause a chain reaction that helps improve the state of the planet. The real-life tips for going green that she offers as the face of green media are just what people need to get off the pollution train and start being responsible.

Simran Sethi’s Green Score: 24,783

Photo credit: Domino Mag