Tobacco and Deforestation
Trees are cut down to make a lot of different things, right? Homes, fuel, and a ton of other things that are super important. But what about cigarettes?
Why do tobacco companies cut down hundreds of thousands of forest acres every year just to make a deadly product?
The Impact of "Curing" Tobacco
When cigarettes are made, the tobacco has to be dried out in a process called "curing." To do so, some tobacco companies burn wood for as long as seven days to get the tobacco leaves dry. That’s an entire week of burning wood. When you break it down, it can take up to 5.7lbs of wood* just to make enough tobacco for one pack of cigarettes.
How many packs of cigarettes do you see at any gas station or convenience store? Tons right? That’s a lot of wood. Read more about the curing process in this study. Download
*Calculated using findings from Tobacco Growing in Uganda study (Muwanga-Bayego, 1994) that found that farmers reported using 130kg of wood to cure 1kg of tobacco, while government and tobacco industry officials estimate 100kg of wood to cure 1kg of tobacco. Using the government and tobacco industry’s own estimate, we calculated the per pack wood requirement assuming 26g of tobacco per pack of cigarettes. Converting to pounds, this amounted to 5.7lbs of wood per pack of cigarettes.
Global Impact
There are so many issues facing the world today. You can now add tobacco-related deforestation to that list. 35 countries are facing environmental crises just because tobacco companies continue to slash and burn their trees to make cigarettes. In South Africa, 12% of all trees cut down are used to make tobacco products. It’s even worse in Korea, where 45% of deforestation is attributed to tobacco production. Check out the graph below and read the study here.
Littering the World
Walk down any sidewalk or road, and you’ll see cigarette butts everywhere! They litter our cities, our parks, and our beaches. But this form of pollution is more than just nasty to look at. Discarded butts are also dangerous to the environment.
So Many Butts
Sure, there’s a lot of other forms of trash, but that doesn’t make it right, especially when you consider that an estimated 1.69 BILLION cigarette butts litter the world every single year. So, by the time you graduate high school at 18 years old, 30.42 billion cigarette butts will have been added to the world’s litter problem.
Trashing the Beach
A lot of effort goes into keeping our beaches clean, so you can imagine how frustrating it is when cigarette butts are routinely the most collected piece of trash in beach clean up efforts. And that’s not even counting the butts that end up in the water and end up hurting marine life.
That’s right, all those chemicals that are left in cigarette butts leak out and make fish and other aquatic species sick. Read more about all those butts, clean up efforts, and sick fish in these studies. Download Download
