WHO recently shared worrying facts about how tobacco affects health and the environment. This stresses the need to make the tobacco industry more responsible. Each year, the tobacco industry causes more than 8 million deaths, worsening the already big health crisis. Most tobacco is grown in poorer countries, taking away crucial resources like water and farmland from producing essential food to grow harmful tobacco plants.

Environmental Toll of Tobacco Production

Tobacco harms nature too. Every year, it makes us lose 600 million trees, 200,000 hectares of land, 22 billion metric tons of water, and 84 million metric tons of CO2. This makes global warming worse and adds to deforestation.

Carbon Footprint of the Tobacco Industry

The WHO report, named "Tobacco: Poisoning Our Planet," shows that the tobacco industry's carbon footprint—covering production, processing, and transportation—is as much as one-fifth of the yearly CO2 emissions from commercial airlines. Tobacco as a Major Pollutant Tobacco items, especially cigarettes, are known as the most commonly littered things worldwide, holding more than 7,000 harmful chemicals. About 4.5 trillion cigarette filters add to pollution in oceans, rivers, cities, parks, soil, and beaches each year. Most companies use An blank cigarette boxes to sell their tobacco items. Plastic Pollution from Tobacco Products Cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and e-cigarettes play a big part in plastic pollution. Cigarette filters, which have tiny bits of plastic, are the second-highest source of plastic pollution globally. Even though these filters don't show proven health benefits, they're widespread in the industry. WHO is urging policymakers to see cigarette filters as single-use plastics and push back against industry promotion. The organization supports potential bans on these filters to protect both public health and the environment.

Economic Impact and Responsibility

The cost of cleaning up littered tobacco products ends up on the shoulders of taxpayers instead of the industry. Countries like China, India, Brazil, and Germany deal with significant yearly expenses, underscoring the need for a change in responsibility. France and Spain, as well as San Francisco, California, have put in place effective "extended producer responsibility legislation." This makes the tobacco industry responsible for cleaning up the pollution it creates, aligning with the Polluter Pays Principle.

Product consumption

Being around tobacco smoke can seriously affect your health, causing lung cancer, heart disease, and lung problems. Even being in places where people have smoked can expose you to leftover chemicals, but we're not exactly sure how much that affects your health yet. Most cigarettes are lit using matches or lighters filled with gas. If, for example, one match is used to light two cigarettes, the six trillion cigarettes smoked worldwide each year would mean cutting down about nine million trees to make three trillion matches. There are also environmental problems from making and throwing away the plastic, metal, and butane used in cigarette lighters.

Carbon dioxide emissions

Smoking tobacco directly releases 2,600,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and about 5,200,000 metric tons of methane. In 66 low- and middle-income countries, data shows that growing and drying tobacco led to significant deforestation from 1990 to 1995, totaling around 2000 hectares. On average, this accounted for 5% of each country's estimated deforestation during those five years. Globally, about 13,000,000 hectares of forest are lost every year due to farming or natural causes. At least 200,000 hectares of this are because of tobacco farming and drying. Deforestation is the second-largest human-made source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (about 20%), after burning fossil fuels. An estimate suggests that deforestation in tobacco farming and drying contributes to almost 5% of global greenhouse gas production.

The Environmental Impact of Tobacco: 3 Reasons

1. Greenhouse Gases To make tobacco ready for sale, it goes through a process called curing. This involves heating it to reduce moisture and preserve it. Commonly, wood or coal is used to power the furnaces for this process, using about 8.05 million metric tons of wood each year. Once cured, the tobacco is turned into products like cigarettes and cigars. Every year, tobacco curing puts 44.7 million tons of CO2 into the air, and tobacco manufacturing adds 15.7 million tons of CO2. Together, these contribute to the 84 million tons of CO2 produced by the whole tobacco industry annually. This carbon footprint is almost like the carbon output of countries such as Peru and Israel. Also, we don't know much about how the tobacco industry makes custom e-cigarette boxes and what impact those products have on the environment. This is concerning because they deal with harmful chemicals and electrical waste.
2. Cigarette Butts In 2019, almost a million cigarette butts were found at U.S. beaches, and globally, 4.2 million were picked up. The issue is that these butts don't break down because they have plastic. When they end up in oceans and rivers (often through drains), the butts break down and let out nicotine and chemicals, hurting the environment. A study found one butt, soaked in water for a day, released enough toxins to kill half of the exposed fish. Butts on land can also release chemicals into the soil or be eaten by animals.
3. E-cigarette Waste Making e-cigarettes adds to the problem of single-use plastics, especially with more people using throwaway pods and vapes. But the companies making them aren't responsible for telling people how to throw them away, right? There aren't set rules for recycling e-cigarette waste, and the companies that handle electronic and hazardous waste aren't fully ready to deal with the liquid and batteries in vape waste.

WHO's Recommendations for Action

‘WHO’ is telling countries and cities to learn from examples set by developed countries. They want more support for tobacco farmers to switch to crops that are better for the environment. Also, they suggest putting strong taxes on tobacco, maybe even ones that help the environment. And it's a good idea to give people help to quit using tobacco.