Smoke and mirrors

Going Green is very pleased to invite awards for most preaching article of the stop smoking season, combining both the traditional “it’s bad for your health” style reasons for stubbing out the fags with some modern day do-gooding environmental doom saying.

But does anyone really give up for green reasons? During the research for this article one person claimed it was “far-fetched” to claim such a thing, but Jo Locker, tobacco policy manager for the South East, says: “It has been found campaigns targeting young people which highlight environmental impacts of the tobacco industry can be useful.

“If you say to a young person who smokes, ‘You might get cancer when you are 60’, it doesn’t really mean anything, but if you say, ‘Tobacco farming is doing this now to people in Africa’, it really motivates them”.

The good news is that, in this instance, the best way to do your bit for the planet is simply to stop smoking. And as an irritatingly pious ex-smoker myself, I can honestly say quitting is much easier than, say, restructuring the global economy to value happiness and the services provided by nature as much as it does the dollar (see next week’s Green).

So if you are at any point of the trying-to-stop process, and have any kind of environmental aspirations, here are some motivating thoughts to keep you, and the other million people who all manage to stop on No Smoking Day, away from the ashtray.

The litter problem

According to Tobacco Control, a peer-reviewed publication of the British Medical Journal Group, at least 4.5 trillion non-disposable filter tipped cigarettes are discarded improperly across the world every single year.

The filters are made from cellulose acetate, a plastic which can take up to 12 years to decompose.

Encams, the charity behind the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, estimate 200 million cigarette butts are dropped every day in the UK, amounting to 122 tonnes of rubbish, making it the most littered item in the country.

Quantity, but is it quality?

Environmental research group The Worldwatch Institute say in 2005, the world produced 868 cigarettes for every man, woman and child on the planet. That’s a lot of resources used up for something which is, in essence, completely pointless.

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Tobacco Atlas says more than four million hectares of land is used to grow tobacco crops. Of course, tobacco farmers earn a living from their crops, but the disparity between crop value and tobacco company profit margin is vast.

Globally, the crops are worth about $20 billion a year, yet during the same time period, the five big tobacco companies pull in the combined profit of some $108.2 billion.

The WHO says: “The tobacco industry exploits them [farmers] by contributing to their debt burden, while using their economic plight to argue against efforts to control tobacco.”

The WHO also adds that in many developing countries, thanks to aggressive marketing campaigns, as much as 10% of household income is spent on cigarette products, diverting money from food, healthcare and education.

On the upside, this relationship seems to be crumbling, and one Appalachian farmer quoted on eco website treehugger.com said while his best acre of tobacco garnered him just $2,500 last season, his acre of organic grape tomatoes yielded a whopping $20,000.

Deforestation

Those fags that go so well after a meal or with a pint are also a key driver of deforestation. Deforestation itself is thought to account for up to one-fifth of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s transport put together.

Campaign group Action On Smoking And Health (ASH) says 200,000 hectares of woodland is destroyed by tobacco farming every year.

Other estimates say it amounts to 1.5% of global deforestation.

In South Korea, it is thought up to 40% of the country’s deforestation is due to the farming of tobacco.

Drying the plant once it is harvested brings additional problems, requiring some 11.4 million tons of solid wood every year – equating to roughly one tree for every 300 cigarettes.

If, like most smokers, you are on 20 a day, then that’s a tree being felled every fortnight to fuel your habit.

Pesticides

Tobacco is a hard plant to grow and it’s fragility means it requires oceans of pesticides and insecticides to keep plantations productive. Among these are the highly toxic aldicarb and chlorpyrifos, and ozone- depleting methyl bromide.

All the major tobacco companies now claim they are moving towards more environmentally friendly production methods.

However, a 2005 report by the University of California using documents gained under the Freedom of Information Act found the tobacco industry has actively lobbied to weaken laws regarding international pesticide use, allowing the continued use of chemicals which are harmful to both humans and the environment.

Carbon emissions British American Tobacco (BAT), which has a 15.4% stake in the cigarette market and makes brands such as Benson & Hedges, Rothmans and Lucky Strike, had an output of approximately half-a-million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2006, according to ASH.

Tobacco industry documents also suggest Philip Morris, who make Marlboro brand cigarettes, were complicit in the industry-sponsored climate change denial industry in the 1990s, which stalled critical action by seven or eight years.

Author and campaigner George Monbiot says: “It is fair to say the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years.”

People

While America used to have a stronghold on tobacco production, it is now predicted by 2010, nearly 90% of all tobacco crops will come from developing countries where the links to poverty are known.

In Malawi, 70% of it’s foreign exchange earnings come from tobacco. The country also has one of the highest incidences of child labour in the world.

In 2001, The Tobacco Association of Malawi formed a task force to eradicate child labour, but in 2008 one study found that around 35,000 children between 10-14 years old were still working in the tobacco fields and tobacco companies received nearly $40 million over the last four years through the use of unpaid child labour.