Public Health: WHO indicts tobacco industry for causing ‘devastating’ environmental impacts

*The World Health Organisation has indicted the global tobacco industry for causing widespread deforestation, diverting badly needed land and water in poor countries away from food production, spewing out plastic and chemical wastes as well as emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide across the globe

Isola Moses | ConsumerConnect

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has stated the tobacco industry is a far greater threat than many consumers realise as it is one of the world’s biggest polluters, from leaving mountains of waste to driving global warming.

ConsumerConnect reports the global health body Tuesday, May 31, 2022, accused the industry of causing widespread deforestation, diverting badly needed land and water in poor countries away from food production, spewing out plastic and chemical waste as well as emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide.

It said: “Environmental impacts of tobacco farming include massive use of water, large-scale deforestation, and contamination of the air and water systems.

“Many countries that grow and/or produce tobacco are low- or middle-income countries and some of them face substantive food insecurity, and even hunger.”

In a report the WHO released on World No Tobacco Day, the UN regulatory agency urged the tobacco industry players and stakeholders to be held to account and foot the bill for the cleanup worldwide.

The organisation stated in the report: “Tobacco: poisoning our planet”, looks at the impacts of the whole cycle, from the growth of plants to the manufacturing of tobacco products, to consumption and waste.

While tobacco’s health impacts have been well documented for decades — with smoking still causing more than eight million deaths worldwide every year — the report focuses on its broader environmental consequences.

The findings are “quite devastating,” Ruediger Krech, WHO Director of Health Promotion, told AFP, slamming the industry as “one of the biggest polluters that we know of.”

The industry is responsible for the loss of some 600 million trees each year, while tobacco growing and production uses 200,000 hectares of land and 22 billion tonnes of water annually, the report found.

It also emits around 84 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, it said.

4.5 Trillion cigarette butts

Besides, “tobacco products are the most littered item on the planet, containing over 7,000 toxic chemicals, which leech into our environment when discarded,” Krech said.

The WHO Director of Health Promotion also observed that each one of the estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts that end up in our oceans, rivers, sidewalks and beaches every year can pollute 100 litres of water.

And up to a quarter of all tobacco farmers contract so-called green tobacco sickness, or poisoning from the nicotine they absorb through the skin.

Farmers who handle tobacco leaves all day consume the equivalent of 50 cigarettes worth of nicotine a day, Krech said.

This is especially worrying for the many children involved in tobacco farming.

“Just imagine a 12-year-old being exposed to 50 cigarettes a day,” he said.

Most tobacco is grown in poorer countries, where water and farmland are often in short supply, and where such crops are often grown at the expense of vital food production, the report said.

Tobacco farming also accounts for about five percent of global deforestation, and drives depletion of precious water resources.

Plastic pollution

Simultaneously, the processing and transportation of tobacco account for a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions — with the equivalent of one-fifth of the global airline industry’s carbon footprint, according to the global health body.

Aside from these, WHO stated that products, such as cigarettes, smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes also contribute significantly to the global build-up of plastic pollution, WHO warned.

Cigarette filters contain microplastics — the tiny fragments that have been detected in every ocean and even at the bottom of the world’s deepest trench — and make up the second-highest form of plastic pollution worldwide, the report said.

And yet, despite tobacco industry marketing, WHO stressed that there is no evidence filters provide any proven health benefits over smoking non-filtered cigarettes.

The UN agency urged policy makers worldwide to treat cigarette filters as single-use plastics, and to consider banning them.

It also decried that taxpayers around the world had been covering the towering costs of cleaning up the tobacco industry’s mess.

Each year, China for instance dishes out around $2.6 billion and India around $766 million, while Brazil and Germany pay some $200 million each to clean up littered tobacco products, the report said.

WHO, therefore, insisted that more countries should follow the so-called Polluter Pays Principle, as in France and Spain.

It is important, Krech said, that “the industry pay actually for the mess that they are creating.”