Find Out How Cigarettes Can Be Harmful To The Environment

When you think about smoking a cigarette, you most likely know that it is affecting your personal health. However, you may not be aware that smoking cigarettes can affect the environment around you, and for years to come.

It’s not just that there is poisonous vapors being put into the air when you smoke, or the cigarette filters being thrown on the ground, it is more of a big picture effect. Tobacco farming has effects on deforestation and climate change.

Tobacco farming is process that uses enormous amounts of pesticides, growth regulators and chemical fertilizers. These things mostly affect low income and middle income countries that do not have high regulatory standards. This farming can also deplete the soil of its much needed nutrients, nutrients that could be used to grow food. “If tobacco farmers around the globe were to grow food instead, they could feed more than 70% of the world’s 28 million malnourished people”. Each year, more land is cleared for tobacco crops, instead of much needed food crops.

Tobacco smoke emits 8 billion kilograms of greenhouse gases per year, compared to 8.9 kg released by burning one gallon of fuel. This may not seem like a lot, considering the amount of gas every person in the world uses per year, however in the grand scheme of things, cutting out 8 billion kilograms of gas emission could make a huge difference.

As for the litter of cigarettes, cigarette filters are not biodegradable. Most people throw their burned cigarette on the ground without a second thought. Why? Because that is what everyone does right? This should not be a normalized practice. Litter from cigarettes are the most collected item in any beach cleanup, and they are toxic to marine life.

“Every year, 27 million pounds of pesticides are used to grow tobacco, and each year 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered worldwide”. Help stop the statistics!