Does the tobacco industry contribute to climate change?

Tobacco is a plant (Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana rustica) that contains nicotine, an addictive drug that acts as both a stimulant and depressant. Tobacco is available in many forms, including cigarettes, pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, and snuff or snus. Nicotine is also available in non-tobacco products, including gum, patches, and other smoking cessation aids.

When looking at the word NO TOBACCO, people usually consider the health impacts of tobacco. But the damage goes beyond that. The environmental consequences of smoking make it a planetary problem. So, it is not just about the lives of tobacco users; those around them, or even those involved in tobacco production, are impacted.

The Climate Fact Checks team investigated whether tobacco smoke significantly impacts climate change and how it happens.

The many dangers of Tobacco

Did you know? Every year the tobacco industry costs the world more than 8 million human lives, 600 million trees, 200 000 hectares of land, 22 billion tonnes of water, and 84 million tonnes of CO2. Also, Tobacco products are the most littered item on the planet, containing over 7000 toxic chemicals, which leech into our environment when discarded. In addition, roughly 4.5 trillion cigarette filters pollute our oceans, rivers, city sidewalks, parks, soil, and beaches annually. Cigarette butts are theoretically biodegradable (made of cellulose acetate), but it takes under 2 years to completely vanish under perfect environmental conditions. Read more here, Archived.

Tobacco Cultivation

                        Tobacco cultivating Countries

Tobacco cultivation requires substantial labor, land, fertilizer, and water inputs while releasing significant toxicity to land and water ecosystems. Both land clearance for cultivation and the burning of wood and charcoal for curing tobacco are substantial contributors to deforestation. Nine of the ten largest tobacco cultivators are low-income or middle-income countries, and four are defined as low-income food-deficit countries.

The tobacco industry contributes to climate change with an annual greenhouse gas contribution of 84 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. It reduces climate resilience, wasting resources and damaging ecosystems necessary for human society. Unfortunately, very few people are aware of this side of the tobacco industry’s influence on the planet. They might be vaguely familiar that smoking contributes to global warming (and it does, negligibly, since it emits carbon dioxide and methane) but would be surprised to what extent the entire industry adversely affects the whole ecosystem.

Scientific research found that the global production of six trillion cigarettes in 2014 used 4 million hectares of arable land. Most of this tobacco was grown on scarce land in food-insecure countries and then exported. Wood is also used in large quantities to cure tobacco leaves. As a fast method of tobacco curing, ‘flue-curing uses wood or coal burning to heat the air that cures the tobacco leaves. An estimated 50 million trees are cut down yearly for this purpose. Although more efficient methods of tobacco leaf curing exist, farmers may not be able to afford these more sustainable methods. Instead, they maintain their practice of cutting down indigenous trees, which is harmful to the environment but convenient for them.

How the tobacco industry harms the environment?

• Soil degradation by tobacco industries

Tobacco cultivation has been linked to soil degradation as well as deforestation. In addition, planting a monoculture crop and using herbicides and pesticides exhaust the soil and reduce its fertility, making it more difficult for plants to grow.

Nicotine found in tobacco also poses threats to soil health. Some studies show that plants absorb nicotine through their roots if cigarette butts contaminate the soil. Plants also ‘inhale’ nicotine through the air that contains it. Since tobacco absorbs more nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium than other primary food and cash crops, growing tobacco decreases soil fertility more rapidly than other crops. The tobacco industry, as a whole produces an enormous quantity of waste. This industry annually produces nearly 2.5 billion kilograms of manufacturing waste in addition to 210 million tons of toxic waste. Tobacco cultivation adds thousands of tons of chemicals into the soil.

• Deforestation

An estimated 1.5 billion hectares of (mainly tropical) forests have been lost worldwide since the 1970s, contributing up to 20% of annual greenhouse gas increases. Deforestation is one of the most significant contributors to CO2 emissions and climate change. Loss of biodiversity is another consequence and has been associated with tobacco-driven habitat t fragmentation in Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Ghana, Honduras, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. It is also associated with land degradation or desertification in the form of soil erosion, reduced soil fertility and productivity, and the disruption of water cycles. Tobacco growing and curing are both direct causes of deforestation since forests are cleared for the tobacco plantations, and wood is burned to cure the tobacco leaves.

In the 1970s and 1980s, tobacco-growing countries, mainly in Asia and Africa, experienced fuel wood shortages related to tobacco production that probably accelerated deforestation in those countries. By the mid-1990s, more than half of the 120 tobacco-growing low and middle-income countries were experiencing losses of 211 000 hectares of natural wooded areas annually, around 2124 ha per country.

Moreover, farmers clear forested lands that are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species, often by burning the forest down. This leads to the substantial and often irreversible losses of trees. The unsustainable farming practices used to cultivate tobacco have been linked to losses in biodiversity.

• Tobacco and Water Contamination

Marine life is threatened by cigarette butt pollution. Research shows that certain algae die after exposure to water-containing compounds equivalent to two discarded cigarette butts. Those algae are at the bottom of the food chain. All other sea organisms feed on it and accumulate the same amount or more toxins in the body, leading to a phenomenon called bioaccumulation. In lands, All it takes is a bit of rainfall, and it washes away harmful ingredients accumulated in the soil. Cigarette butts cause pollution by being carried, as runoff, to drains, rivers, beaches, and oceans. In 2008, for example, the International Coastal Cleanup program cleared about 3.2 million cigarette butts from waterways and beaches. This was almost twice the amount of all other trash. Whenever cigarette filters find a way into water systems, they can be ingested by fish because they resemble fish food like insects. The filters remain within the fish, reducing their stomach capacity and thus affecting their eating habits. Research in the US also found that the runoff from just a single cigarette butt can kill a fish in a 1 Liter jar of water. If this is translated into the amounts of cigarette butts that find their way into water systems, it’s more than clear the degree to which fish are impacted every year.

• Tobacco and the Atmosphere

Cigarette smoking causes environmental pollution by releasing toxic air pollutants into the atmosphere. The industrial processing and smoking of cigarettes add vast volumes of air pollutants into the atmosphere. Second-hand smoke pollutes the air directly, and the manufacturing process releases air pollutants in many ways. It starts in the tobacco farms where the machines emit greenhouse gases from the fossil fuel combusted to produce energy. Carbon dioxide, methane, and other noxious chemicals are present in second-hand smoke, which causes air pollution through smoking. Although methane and carbon dioxide are not deadly to smokers, the gases add to the general atmospheric pollution. Smoking globally emits nearly 2.6 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide and 5.2 billion kilograms of methane annually into the atmosphere. This provides a clear picture of how smoking alone contributes to climate change.

Smoking is a dangerous epidemic, claiming more than eight million lives each year globally, out of which 1.2 million victims are non-smokers. As highlighted by the latest WHO global report on trends in the prevalence of tobacco use 2000-2025.

It is not easy to decrease the count of tobacco users. After all, Nicotine is an addictive substance that keeps the user craving more.

Increasing consumer awareness of the environmental toxicity and dangers posed by discarding cigarette and e-cigarette related waste into landfills and encouraging smokers and vapers to quit using these products altogether are the best ways to protect the environment from tobacco product waste. Fortunately, tobacco is neither useful to humans nor the planet; hence its eradication will not cause a crisis.

-With Inputs from Dinesh Balasri–