Environmental Impact of Smoking
Cigarettes contain roughly four thousand different chemicals, within which there are fifty well-known and well-documented carcinogens. They are highly addictive, and they pollute the body of the smoker, create toxic secondhand smoke, and even serve as a form of both air and ground pollution. This, however, is not where the environmental impact of smoking ends.
Yes, those who pitch their “butts” out of a window or on the ground are certainly helping to create quite a toxic mess, especially when you consider how many never reach a garbage can. The average materials in a cigarette take a full twenty-five years to completely break down, and all while leaching their mixture of chemicals into the surrounding soil and plant life. This of course is the end result of the entire process, but the worst part of the smoking and environmental equation is actually in the creation of cigarettes.
Consider that tobacco is a “heavy feeder” plant that demands high nitrogen compounds to reach maturity. This means that tobacco farms are places that use excessive amounts of fertilizers that run off into nearby streams and lakes where the nitrogen increases the dominance of certain plants and can pollute the ground and water leaving it uninhabitable by other species too. Additionally, cigarettes must use special papers to wrap the tobacco, and this too is hazardous to the environment simply because it demands a constant supply of fresh paper pulp. What is the main ingredient in paper pulp? Trees – and the tobacco industry is guilty of consuming millions of trees each and every year.
When you take a good look at the cigarette production process it is easy to understand how horrible cigarettes are for the world. It requires excessive consumption of water, uses toxic fertilizers that kill the land, and gobbles up millions of trees that are processed in environmentally hazardous ways. It calls for the processing of thousands of different chemical compounds and then creates all kinds of costly health conditions in the world’s millions of smokers. These smokers will also dispose of the remnants of their cigarettes in ways that lead to even further pollution and destruction too.
If all of this doesn’t provide a good reason to quit smoking tobacco products, the fact that five million people perish each year thanks to the effects of their cigarette smoking habits should serve as inspiration. Because the world is becoming so well-aware of the dangers of smoking there are all kinds of programs and support for those who are trying to kick the habit, and they will all help everyone to become a bit of an environmentalist along the way!
