It is a common belief among cigarette smokers that they are only
hurting themselves. In fact they are not only hurting themselves, but
also the earth.
These days everyone knows what smoking cigarettes does to our bodies, but the knowledge of what smoking does to the Earth is.
It is fairly obvious that smoking pollutes the air and quite often the
ground. However, it is not always obvious how or how much smoking
pollutes. Cigarettes contain over 4000 chemicals which are exhaled and
released into the air and the atmosphere. Trees are often compared to the lungs
in our bodies because they perform basically the same functions as our
lungs do on a global scale. With all of the pollutants that the trees
filter out for us already it seems almost crazy to add more to the air
that doesn’t need to be added. We need to breathe, but no one needs to
smoke. Not as common. People who love them and the environment.
The pollution caused by cigarettes does not stop in our bodies or the
air; it also affects the land we live on and the water that we drink.
Millions of cigarette butts are discarded onto the ground every day. These are
only the ones that are picked up in one state and millions more are
never picked up. They end up in the rivers and lakes where fish and
animals eat them by mistake and quite often die from it. The rest are
left on the ground to decompose which will take an average of 25 years
while all of the chemicals and additives leach into the ground and
pollute the soil and the plants.It looks unattractive, it is a major fire hazard in dry weather, and it is extremely harmful to the environment.
Probably the most impacting aspect of cigarettes is actually producing
them. There is the land used to grow the crops all over the world that
could be put to better use by planting more trees or food for starving
children in third world countries. These crops are also often sprayed
with a lot of harmful pesticides and chemicals because tobacco is a very
fragile plant and is likely to pick up disease. It also takes a lot of
trees to produce and package cigarettes. Cigarette manufacturing uses
four miles of paper an hour just for rolling and packaging cigarettes.
One tree is wasted for every three hundred cigarettes produced. Those
trees could be filtering out the pollutants already in the air instead
of being chopped down for the cause of adding new ones. There is still
the energy and water wasted in manufacturing cigarettes that needs to be
considered and with soil depletion and chemical wastage added on top of
that it becomes clear that manufacturing cigarettes has an enormous
strain on the environment.
The tobacco industry is quite unwilling to use better technology to
reduce the impact they are having on the environment because it would
take up too much of their billions of dollars in profit every year. They
are often trying to have more trees planted, but since they use trees
to dry the tobacco and for rolling and packaging it is probably not
concern for the environment, but concern for losing their wood sources
that encourage them to do this. They do not care about polluting our
bodies so it seems unlikely that they would think twice about polluting
our environment.
The only way to stop them from harming the environment is to stop buying
their products. Quitting smoking is hard, but it can be done and it’s
not only about the harm smokers are doing to their own bodies, it’s also
about the harm they are doing to the earth and the pain that they are
causing their friends and families.
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