The slopes on the sides of the Kunati Valley, near Mount Kenya, are now completely bare . . . their former covering of trees has been cut down to be used as fuel for curing tobacco.
“TOBACCO DEPLETES FOOD-CROP LAND,” SMOKE SIGNALS, 1982
The final scene of the 1950 sci-fi flick Destination Moon shows a team of American astronauts faced with a life-or-death crisis. The spacecraft has successfully landed on the moon, but faulty navigation has forced the voyagers to use up more fuel than expected, and they realize they cannot make it back to earth without shedding some weight. The crew starts looking everywhere to lose some pounds: a ladder is jettisoned, along with wrenches, clothing, and pretty much everything else not absolutely essential. Self-sacrifice is the leitmotiv, and only some clever and drastic pruning prevents them from having to leave one of their own behind.
For us here on earth, too, there may come a time—if it is not already upon us—when we will be forced to think about what parts of our consumptive lifestyle we can do without. The wealthy of the globe now live in an unsustainable world of wanton excess, where a newspaper may have a hundred pages of colored-ink ads, lawns grow useless crops of chemicalized grass, and water is drunk from throwaway plastic cups and bottles. The talk is all of energy efficiency and alternative fuels, but surprisingly little has been done to cut effectively into excess and waste, or even to slow the rate of exhausting unrenewable fuels.
Where does tobacco figure in this equation? How sustainable is the cigarette, and what contribution does it make to global pollution, global resource use, and global climate change?
We tend to take it for granted, but cigarettes are actually among the world’s biggest sources of toxic trash. Six trillion are rolled and smoked every year, and since most have filters this means nearly six trillion butts discarded every year. If each cigarette weighs a gram and the butt is one-sixth of that, that’s a billion kilograms of plasticized, nicotine-soaked, cellulose acetate refuse, much of which gets tossed onto the ground. This is a nontrivial body of litter; it is also a substantial mass of toxic waste. Cigarette butts contain benzene, nicotine, cadmium, and dozens of other poisons, not the kind of thing you want in your environment.
Not all butts remain unconsumed. Especially in poorer parts of the world and more miserable moments of history, discarded butts are often gathered, re-rolled, and re-smoked. Germans in the early years after World War II would collect discarded butts and twist them into cigarettes—five or six would usually do the trick. The practice has even been commercialized. In Indonesia, butts are sometimes gathered up off the ground and sent back to the factory, where they are recycled into “new” cigarettes. The more common fate, though, is for them to remain where they have been thrown—until they are washed downstream or eaten by birds or picked up by litter patrols. The quantity is such that these are often the single most common form of litter—gauged by number of pieces. In the United States alone an estimated 68,000 tons of cigarette waste are discarded every year—and that’s not counting the paper/cellophane packs. Even the Cigarette Litter Prevention Program financed by Philip Morris admits that cigarette butts account for about a third of all litter in the United States, measured by number of individual pieces. And whereas in the pre-filter era these were fairly quickly degraded—or re-smoked—the use of plasticizers in recent designs has made them more durable. The net result: poison- laced filters are a ubiquitous feature in modern civilization, fouling sidewalks and sewers and urinals—and virtually every other place smokers frequent. Butts end up on beaches and in waterways, releasing toxins as they degrade.
How toxic, though, is a cigarette butt?
Environmental scientists have developed techniques to measure the extent to which a body of water has been fouled, using organisms with predictable responses to pollutants. One standard method uses a freshwater flea, Daphnia magna, a tiny crustacean sensitive to a broad range of toxins and a vital link in aquatic food chains. Daphnia eat algae and are eaten in turn by a wide variety of fish. So the extent to which a lake or stream has been polluted can be assessed by asking, how dirty does a body of water have to be to kill half the Daphnia in it? “Whole effluent” tests of this sort provide useful assessments of how badly a body of water has been polluted, without having to go through costly and time-consuming assays of individual contaminants.
Cigarette butts don’t fare very well in such tests. Smoke of course is toxic and kills people, so it is hardly surprising that the used butt ends of cigarettes can toxify water. Experiments have shown that a single used “filter” placed in eight liters of water will kill half the Daphnia living therein. And cigarette butts can even kill fish. Richard Gersberg of San Diego State University has shown that one used butt dropped into a liter of water will kill half of all exposed freshwater fish (fathead minnows) or marine fish (topsmelt). More surprising is his demonstration that filters even from unsmoked cigarettes can kill. One might think that filters fresh from the pack would be inert, but even these are often infused with humectants, flavorants, plasticizers, and other compounds that can leach into groundwater (not to mention your lips and lungs). Gersberg has shown that sixteen unsmoked filters placed into a liter of water release enough toxins to kill fish.1
There is a certain irony in all this, insofar as the growth of outdoor cigarette waste is partly the result of successful efforts to abolish indoor smoking. Bans on indoor smoking have pushed smokers onto the streets, which is one reason butts get tossed onto the ground. And one reason even non-smokers who live in places like New York have so much cotinine—a nicotine metabolite—in their blood. Cotinine is the most easily accessed nicotine biomarker, and the fact that New Yorkers show elevated blood cotinine is due in part to their exposure to secondhand smoke outdoors. The same is no doubt true in many other parts of the world. In European cities such as Vienna, where outdoor smoking is nearly ubiquitous, non-smokers partaking of café culture must have high levels of tobacco toxins in their blood.
A number of communities have started organizing to prevent cigarette butt waste. In California, Tom Novotny at San Diego State University has formed the Cigarette Butt Advisory Committee and Cigarette Butt Pollution Project with the goal of reducing toxic waste from discarded butts (see Cigwaste.org). A number of countries have taken aggressive steps along these lines: in Singapore, for example, tossing a butt on the ground can earn you a $300 fine, and convicted litterbugs are required to help clean city streets. The anti-butt movement was also strong early on in Sydney, Australia, where in 1996 cigarette butts were declared “a compact concentrate of hazardous waste” and the city’s “number-one environmental problem.” An estimated 6.7 billion butts were being discarded annually on the city’s streets, clogging drains and polluting Sydney Harbor. The problem had become more acute in the 1980s, when the city’s 800,000 smoking workers were barred from smoking indoors and flooded onto the streets. The city’s “Please Bin That Butt” campaign posted a fine of A$200 for anyone found littering, and though the ordinance became the butt of many jokes, the city did manage to solve much of its litter problem.2
Other solutions have been proposed. In 2009 San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom sought a 33-cent-per-pack fee to cover the $11 million cost of cigarette litter removal (the enacted version was 20 cents). Others have suggested a deposit tax, like the bottle bills from the 1960s that dramatically reduced glass and plastic waste from American roads and parks. Bottle deposits aided both in cleanup and recycling, and there is no reason to think this would not work for cigarette butts. Thomas Frieden in New York and Kelly Brownell in Connecticut have proposed taxing sugary soft drinks to curb obesity (“a penny per ounce tax is a public health homerun”),3 and similar measures could help reduce both smoking and cigarette waste.
The tobacco industry has proposed its own solutions—like making cigarettes more biodegradable.4 Biodegradability usually involves making a substance more vulnerable to moisture and heat, however, which does not bode well for a product that is essentially a conduit for moist hot gases. We should not expect to see anything useful from the industry on this score, apart from minor tinkering and showy displays. The industry will continue to support placement of ashtrays (yet more trash, one might say) and use of portable ashtrays, but the simpler and more intelligent solution will be to bar smoking from parks, urban streets, and other outdoor places where people congregate. Smoking is already barred along 140 miles of the California coast, and we are likely to see more smoke-free zones in the future.
We don’t often hear about tobacco as a cause of global climate change, but that is because we tend to ignore the entirety of the cigarette economy: the cutting of forests to make new land for planting or charcoal for flue-curing; the spraying of pesticides on the soil and finished leaf; the heat curing and chemicalization of the product and its transport to factories; the chopping and rolling of the leaf; the paper and plastics used in the affixing of “filters”; the cellophane and foil consumed in packaging; the fuel used for transport and the waste involved in advertising; the ignition and burning of the final product by a billion smokers; the resources used in the manufacture of ashtrays, matches, and plastic or metal lighters; the energies squandered cleaning up cigarette waste; the fires caused by careless disposal; the heaters used to warm smokers taking outdoor breaks; and the costly medical services used to treat diseases caused by cigarettes—all of which exact a toll on the environment. Ten trillion packs of cigarettes have been smoked over the past century, and if each of these (empty) weighs about five grams we are talking about 50 billion kilograms of packaging waste—including paper, ink, cellophane, foil, and glue. Piled into a heap, that would be enough to make a mountain 2.5 kilometers wide and 2.5 kilometers high, or enough to cover the island of Manhattan with a layer about 25 meters thick. Trillions of pages of color-inked ads have been printed in newspapers and magazines, billions of square feet of billboard space occupied, billions of coupons and mail offers mailed, and so forth and so on.
Tobacco manufacturers used to brag about how central cigarettes were to the modern economy, employing three million people in the United States alone, where cigarettes consumed
over 40 million pounds of moisture-proof cellophane, more than 70 million pounds of aluminum foil, nearly 27 billion cartons, all of which contribute greatly to the economies of these industries and in turn the economy of the nation. Altogether about 1,500,000 businesses share in the tobacco trade, supplying equipment, materials, transportation, advertising, distributing and merchandising services in every part of the country.5
Of course in a world where “the economy” is measured by the sheer volume of “goods” consumed, such facts might be impressive. But cigarettes are, in fact, a drag on modern economies, a productive sink, a cause of poverty and of labor incapacity, inter alia. A waste and not a good. For the tobacco man reciting these facts, however, this was obviously a point of pride—which helps explain why this exact passage was plagiarized by at least four other tobacco industry advocates, following its first appearance in 1968 in an article by Frank B. Snodgrass in the United States Tobacco Journal.6 Snodgrass was talking only about the United States, but the global toll is now larger by more than an order of magnitude. Six billion kilograms of cigarettes are smoked worldwide every year, which doesn’t count the packaging, cartons, or cases in which they are housed and transported.
So it should hardly come as a surprise that cigarettes are leaving a sizable carbon footprint on the planet. Global climate change has stimulated a great deal of interest in what are known as “life cycle” comparisons, meaning comparisons of how different industries contribute to greenhouse warming. And sophisticated models have been developed to calculate impacts for different kinds of industry. In 2002, for example, according to the Economic Input-Output Lifecycle Assessment (EIOLCA) models developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Green Design Institute, the $47 billion tobacco industry in the United States was responsible for generating about 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. American automobiles emit an average of about 4.4 tons of carbon per year (driving 12,000 miles), which means that if cigarettes were to disappear from the United States the country would see a carbon benefit equivalent to taking nearly 4 million cars off the road.7
The benefit would actually be significantly higher than this, however, since EIOLCA modelers measure the carbon footprint of an industry (or product) only as far as the factory gate. Ignored are whatever emissions may stem from transporting cigarettes to retail outlets, or from smokers driving to the store to get their fix. More important, though, are the carbon costs of the medical care required to treat illnesses caused by smoking. Health care in the United States is estimated to have a total carbon footprint of about 550 million metric tons of carbon dioxide,8 and since about 5 percent of all U.S. health care costs stem from tobacco—about $100 billion per year—we can assume that about 5 percent of this health care carbon burden could be avoided by eliminating smoking. That adds another 28 million tons of carbon to our cigarette greenhouse gas burden. But there is more.
Tobacco manufacturing is a significant cause of deforestation.9 A 1991 estimate put the amount of land under cultivation for tobacco at 5.3 million hectares, making it the world’s leading non-food crop. Tobacco at that time displaced land that could feed an estimated 10 million to 20 million people.10
Cigarettes are also a major cause of fires, including forest fires, and a substantial contributor to industrial disasters. The largest single industrial accident in the United States was directly caused by smoking: in 1947 careless handling of cigarettes was blamed for igniting 2,600 tons of ammonium nitrate on a ship in the harbor of Texas City, Texas, killing six hundred people and causing an explosion so powerful it knocked planes from the sky. Smoking caused the crash of a Russian-made Ilyushin-18 plane on Christmas Eve 1987 at Canton, killing twenty-three passengers. And cigarettes caused the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, killing 146 New York City garment workers.
Tobacco fires don’t get a lot of attention, but in the United States alone from 1970 through 2000, fires killed about four thousand people per year, with about a quarter of these being traceable to cigarettes.11 The tragedy is magnified by the fact that it is not that hard to make (relatively) fire-safe cigarettes: all you have to do is wrap a few tiny bands of thickened paper around the rod; these bands extinguish the cigarette unless a smoker is actively pulling on it, preventing a dropped cigarette from kindling a fire. Designs of this sort were patented in the 1920s, and the negligence of the industry is such that cigarettes were not made fire-safe until the new millennium. (Manufacturers actually exacerbated the danger by adding burn accelerants to help keep cigarettes lit—and even organized fire marshals to oppose fire-safety standards.) New York was the first state to mandate fire-safe cigarettes—in 2004—and other states have since followed this lead. The shocking fact is that tens of thousands of people have died needlessly from tobacco fires—including people who fell asleep with a cigarette lit. Fire deaths would surely merit a greater public outcry, were it not for the fact that cigarette deaths from heart disease and cancer dwarf those caused by fires by a couple orders of magnitude.
Cigarettes contribute substantially to the global climate crisis. In the United States alone, eliminating cigarettes would yield carbon savings equivalent to raising the fuel efficiency of all cars and trucks by several miles per gallon—or to converting the entire electrical grid of a state like Massachusetts to solar power. Eliminating cigarettes would probably make a bigger dent in the country’s total carbon footprint than is presently made by all of the nation’s wind and solar energy combined. We tend of think of saving the planet as involving painful sacrifices or breakthroughs in science and technology, but in this case global environmental health could be boosted by eliminating the world’s leading cause of preventable death. This is a win-win-win situation, given that most smokers don’t even enjoy their cigarettes—and wish they didn’t smoke. The only real loss, apart from profits for the racketeers extruding the product, will be to governments hooked on cigarette taxes. When the real costs in terms of human health are factored in, however—including lost productivity and the costs of treating smoking illnesses—we return to our triple or even quadruple win: environmental health, medical savings, smokers’ hopes, and the end of the world’s biggest killer.