In 2024 I don’t have to tell anyone that smoking tobacco is unhealthy. In 2022 in The Netherlands 18,9% of the population smoked. The majority of people know that smoking is unhealthy and that it is likely to give you an earlier and awful death. But still, smoking is not forbidden. So, the fact that individuals die from tobacco is apparently not bad enough. But what if we collectively suffer from the tobacco industry? Because we do. Here’s everything you need to know about the environmental impact of tobacco.
Emissions
The tobacco industry produces 80 million tons of CO2 every year. In 2022 the whole world produced about 36,8 giga tons CO2. So, in the grand scheme of things 80 millions tons of CO2 is not much. However, we can never downgrade the impact of an industry like that of tobacco. We need about 4.000.000.000 trees to grow for one year to compensate that number of emissions. If you look at it that way, these emissions are immense. Especially for a sector which adds absolutely no value to the world. It only creates suffering.
Water-use
The water-use of the tobacco industry is just as severe. Every year, the tobacco industry uses 22 billion tons of water. Water stress is a serious problem in some regions. And then to think that we are using the water some people desperately need to make cigarettes for people who want to smoke theirselves to death is just mind-blowing.
Land-use
Next up is land-use. Unfortunately I could not find numbers on the total land-use for the industry. But from one tree you can make 300 cigarettes. And from what I can find on the internet, we smoke 10 billion cigarettes on just one day. It’s hard to count how many trees we need for just one single day of smoking. Imagine 365 days. We do have good numbers on deforestation. Tobacco farming account for about 5% of all deforestation. Most of this land is located in areas which are prone to desertification. About 200000 hectares of land are cleared for the tobacco industry every year.
Pollution
As if all of that isn’t enough, both the industry and the end product (cigarettes) are heavily polluting. For some reason, it’s very normal to dispose cigarette butts on the streets. I find that extremely weird, as we don’t do that with any other type of trash. We should all be offended when someone tosses their cigarette onto the ground. It is found that 25-40% of all global litter consists of cigarettes. One cigarette butt pollutes 100 liters of water. And then of course we have the air pollution from smoking itself, the production (the CO2 I just mentioned above) and the fact that there are more than 7000 chemicals in cigarette smoke. And when it comes to pollution the list gets longer and longer, but I won’t list all facts here. I think you get my point.
All this besides the social impact
Everything I just listed is just the environmental impact of tobacco. And those impacts are already shocking. But there’s a lot more, like we all know: there’s the social impacts of tobacco. We know that smoking is killing about half of all people who smoke. It also harms people who are surrounded by smokers. But there are also social impacts in the production process. Tobacco is a chemical-intensive product and tobacco farmers and there families are exposed to these. And last but certainly not least: there is massive child labor in the tobacco industry. About one million children work in the industry. Big chance that one of the cigarettes smoked in a day by someone has been made by children.
For what?
Of course all industries emit emissions, use water, pollute and have problems in general. If this article was about tomatoes, I’d advocate for better laws, better consumption and other economic measures. But we have to remember: we don’t need tobacco. It’s not an essential product like food or clothing. Nobody needs tobacco to have a good life. In fact, we’d have a better life without tobacco. We cannot justify these emissions for a product we don’t need, nor can we justify the pollution. It’s not a necessary evil.
I don’t know if banning tobacco is the solution, it’s probably not. Then supply chains move into the criminal markets. We should not criminalize the production of tobacco. But we have to do everything we can to prevent people from smoking. So that in a few decades, nobody smokes anymore. People have to know that what they’re doing is not only killing themselves, but it’s killing us too. And that’s what I wanted to bring across in this article. There’s more to smoking than you’d think. Now you know about the environmental impact of tobacco too.
Yours sincerely,
Romee