The tobacco industry has an impact on public health but also causes considerable environmental damage, with large amounts of pollution and emissions contributing to climate change, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday.
“It is one of the biggest pollutants we know”stressed the Department of Health Promotion of the WHO, Rüdiger Krech, in the analysis of a report with “quite disastrous” conclusions about the tobacco industry.
The document, released on World No Tobacco Day, is entitled “Tobacco, poison for our planet” and analyzes the environmental footprint of the sector as a whole, from the cultivation of plants to the manufacture of tobacco products, passing through the consumption and waste.
while the industry is responsible for the loss of 600 million treesTobacco cultivation uses 200,000 hectares of land and 22 billion tons of water a year and emits around 84 million tons of CO2, according to the report.
“Tobacco products, which are the most discarded garbage on the planet, contain more than 7,000 chemical compounds that, once discarded, spread into the environment,” stressed Rüdiger Krech, speaking to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Each of the 4.5 billion cigarette butts that end up in nature each year can contaminate up to 100 liters of waterStand out.
The health dangers of tobacco are not limited to consumption and waste: Nearly a quarter of tobacco growers suffer from green tobacco sickness, a form of nicotine poisoning through the skin.
In constant contact with tobacco leaves, these farmers consume the equivalent of the nicotine contained in 50 cigarettes a dayexplains Krech, who points out that the sector employs a large number of children.
Imagine a 12-year-old child exposed to 50 cigarettes a day,” he warns.
According to the report, tobacco is often grown in very poor countries, where water and cultivated land are often scarce, and where these crops replace crucial food production.
Tobacco farming is also responsible for around 5% of global deforestation and contributes to the depletion of precious water supplies.
A significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions also comes from tobacco processing and transportation, amounting to a fifth of the carbon footprint of air travel.
The WHO also warns against tobacco products – such as electronic cigarettes – which contribute significantly to the accumulation of plastic pollution in the world.
Cigarette filters contain trace amounts of microplastics, small fragments found in the world’s oceans, including at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific and the world’s deepest, making them the second largest source of plastic pollution in the world.
However, contrary to what the tobacco industry claims, there is no evidence that these filters have a beneficial effect on health, stresses the WHO.
Therefore, the UN agency urges politicians around the world to treat these filters as single-use plastics and consider banning them.
The WHO also laments that the massive costs of cleaning up tobacco industry waste are borne by taxpayers around the world.
According to the report, China annually spends about 2,600 million dollars (about 2,400 million euros) in the treatment of residues of tobacco products.
India spends 766 million dollars (about 710 million euros), while Brazil and Germany pay 200 million dollars (about 185 million euros) each.
The WHO also insists that more countries follow the example of France and Spain, adopting the polluter pays principle.
For Rüdiger Krech, it is important that “the industry really pays for the damage it is causing”.
Source: Observadora
