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The World Health Organization (WHO) today published new information on the extent to which tobacco harms the environment and human health, and called for action to be taken to make the industry more responsible for the destruction it causes.
Each year, the tobacco industry is responsible for more than 8 million deaths, the destruction of 600 million trees, 200,000 hectares of land, the loss of 22 billion tons of water and the emission 84 million tonnes of CO2.
Tobacco is grown mostly in low- and middle-income countries, where there is a vital need for water and agricultural land to produce food for the region. Instead, these resources are used to cultivate deadly tobacco plants, while deforestation gains more and more ground.
The WHO report titled: Tobacco: poison for our planet points out that the industry’s carbon footprint from the production, processing and transportation of tobacco is equivalent to one-fifth of the CO2 produced by the commercial airline industry each year, contributing to global warming.
“Tobacco products are the main waste on the planet, and contain more than 7,000 toxic chemicals, which enter our environment when discarded. About 4.5 trillion cigarette filters pollute our oceans, rivers, sidewalks, parks, soils and beaches every year,” said Dr.r Ruediger Krech, Director of the Department of Health Promotion at WHO.
Products like cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and e-cigarettes also contribute to the buildup of plastic pollution. Cigarette filters contain microplastics and are the second highest type of plastic pollution in the world.
Despite marketing by the tobacco industry, there is no evidence that filters have proven health benefits. The WHO is calling on policy makers to see cigarette filters for what they are, single-use plastics, and to consider banning cigarette filters to protect public health and the environment.
The costs associated with cleaning up discarded tobacco products fall on taxpayers rather than the industry that is causing the problem. Every year, it costs China about 2.6 billion United States dollars (USD) and India about 766 million USD. The cost for Brazil and Germany is over USD 200 million (see table below for alternative estimates).
Countries like France and Spain and cities like San Francisco (State of California, United States of America) have decided to act. Indeed, following the polluter-pays principle, they succeeded in establishing “extended producer responsibility legislation” which makes the tobacco industry responsible for cleaning up the pollution it creates.
WHO urges countries and cities to follow this example, and support tobacco growers to shift to sustainable crops, impose high tobacco taxes (which could also include an environmental tax) and to provide support services to help people quit smoking.
Note to editors : In the table below, we present estimates of the costs directly related to waste from tobacco products in a country from each of the WHO regions. These estimates are based on the “proportional estimate” approach, which starts with an estimate of the costs of all waste (“waste from all products”) for each country, then applies an estimate of the proportion of all the waste that constitutes waste from tobacco products (i.e. a “weighting” of waste from tobacco products).
| Estimates of waste from tobacco products in five countries representing each of the World Health Organization (WHO) Regions (2021 USD) |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | [2] | [3] | |
| Estimated cost of waste from all products (has) |
Estimation of the proportion of waste from products of the tobacco (%)b) |
Estimation of the cost of waste from the products of the tobacco (vs) |
|
| Brazil (h) | $1,323,319,752 | 15.32% | $202,725,322 |
| China (d) | $9,299,458,021 | 28.13% | $2,615,524,146 |
| Germany | $891,774,234 | 26.33% | $234,806,889 |
| India (d) | $8,000,741,086 | 9.57% | $766,043,508 |
| Jordan | $137,045,668 | 41.65% | $57,079,188 |
| South Africa | $482,288,286 | 24.30% | $117,175,276 |
| Notes: (a) estimates based on literature and published reports, with the exception of Brazil, China and India, which are calculated based on an estimate of average per capita waste costs from all products corresponding to USD 7.85 per capita; (b) estimates based on the global average of data compiled each year as part of the Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup (annual international coastal clean-up operation organized by Ocean Conservancy); calculated as the percentage of waste from all products that corresponds to waste from tobacco products and weighted by the smoking prevalence established by the WHO in each country; (c) estimate based on the multiplication of waste from all products by the proportion of waste from tobacco products; (d) for Brazil and India, we were unable to identify publicly available sources of waste cost data for all products; thus, for these countries, we impute a cost of waste from all products per capita based on an average of other middle-income countries (USD 7.85; see also note [a] above). | |||
Regarding the estimated cost of waste from all products (column [1]), we relied on the literature and public reports available for the six countries. For Brazil, China and India, we could not identify any source. Thus, for these countries, we imputed the costs of waste from all products by applying the average cost of waste from all products per capita of similar middle-income countries for which data were available. Once the cost of waste from all products was established for all countries, we applied the proportion of waste from tobacco products. The proportion of waste from tobacco products was based on the global average of Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, weighted by the smoking prevalence established by the WHO in each country (i.e. we assumed that countries with higher smoking rates would have higher proportions of waste from tobacco products) . The final estimate of the cost of waste from tobacco products is the cost of waste from all products multiplied by the weighted proportion of waste from tobacco products.
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