So on TV for the last week or so the latest anti smoking ad talks about how cigarette butts are the most picked up item of liter.
Ok, in years past for sure. Now a days maybe, maybe not as the percentage of smokers goes down.
That isn’t the part that has me going WTF. What has me scratching my head is the voice over that says every year billions trees are cut down to make cigarettes.
Seriously, billions of trees? Cigarette paper isn’t very big and it is damn thin. Unless they are making them like toothpicks Cartoon Of Toothpick Factory - YouTube I can’t see how billions of trees are used
Anybody got the straight dope on this?
Suppose you had one billion smokers who used 1# of cigarette paper per year. A lot of the trees they cut for paper are spindly saplings so if they average about 20# it would mean about 50,000,000 trees many of them very young and small.
I suspect that they are referring to both deforestation to clear agricultural land for tobacco growing (a considerable amount of tobacco cultivation has moved to Africa as well as expansion of cultivation in China, India, and Brazil) as well as smoke-curing of tobacco, which takes a surprising amount of wood per bushel of cured tobacco. “Billions” of trees per year sounds high, but many tens of millions per year or even a few hundred wouldn’t surprise me. Wood is a renewable resource, of course, but only if the areas are replanted and allowed to regrow, which is often not the case with agricultural clearcutting.
More horrifying, however, is the use of scarce water, depletion of soild and contamination from tobacco rendering the soil unsuitable for food cultivation, and health impacts from heavy use of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and of course the nicotine itself (referred to as ‘green leaf fever’), often in areas reliant on substinance farming. The tobacco industry will, of course, deny any impacts and point to the profitability of tobacco growing over foodstocks, but then, they turn around and sell their product back to the same people at exhorbiant profits; now that the industrial world has realized the dramatic health impacts of consuming tobacco products, the industry as turned to the developing world as its remaining demographic, aggressively marketing to children and denying harms in ways they are legally prohibited from doing in Europe and North America. (71% of tobacco consumers are now in the developing nations, and there is essentially no regulation or consumer protection in these nations.)
Stranger
Although the butt litter problem has actually gotten worse in some places because of indoor smoking bans. Especially in places where it takes the form of “no smoking 50 feet from an entrance” which has caused the outdoor ashtrays to mostly disappear.
I’m not even going to watch the video, but just to note: cigarettes are sold in packs (made of paper/card), which are in turn packed in wrappers/sleeves made of paper or card, which are shipped in cartons which are made of corrugated board - much of this packaging is ultimately made from wood pulp (although some may have been around the recycle loop a time or two).
Complaints about forest land being clear-cut for tobacco growing should be weighed against the probably much larger volume of forest that would be lost if tobacco had to be replaced with food crops that bring in considerably less money per acre for farmers. Of course, you could make similar arguments about opium poppies and coca trees.
Almost all anti-tobacco ads these days provoke eye-rolling if not a vague desire to take up smoking just to be contrary. And I’m fervently anti-smoking to begin with.
That claim (that a benefit of tobacco cultivation requires less clear cutting than an equivalent revenue value of food crops) can only be rationalized as some kind of benefit if you:
[ul]
[li]Equivalnce tobacco and food as providing a similar substantive value,[/li][li]Disregard the cost of harms done to both users and producers, [/li][li]Neglect that most of the wood used is in the drying and curing process, and[/li][li]Ignore the rapacious practices of tobacco companies in encouraging developing world farmers to cultivate tobacco (using cultivars patented by the companies) at initially favorable crop prices and then, once the crop is established and soil corrupted against more delicate food or textile crops, slash prices paid while demanding higher yields, requiring more pesticides and artificial fertilizers to be used.[/li][/ul]
In fact, tobacco has no substantive value whatsoever. It provides no nutritive value, heals no injuries, cannot be woven into textiles, or otherwise used for anything except to maintain the addictive relationship with the customer base of tobacco users, which tobacco companies ensure by artificially enhancing (freebasing) the nicotine and engineering cigarettes to be faster burning and spoof smoke residue measurement machines by the application of useless ‘filters’, ensuring that consumers smoke more and are less aware of the actual harms, not to mention marketing to unsophisticated people in the developing world using the same unscrupulous practices that have been banned in virtually all industrial nations.
Stranger
The amount of food grown is not determined by how much profit farmers want to make.
An estimated six trillion cigarettes are smoked daily. Conservatively estimating a cigarette paper at 1/6 gram (a dollar bill is one gram), that would be a trillion grams of paper a year, or a million tons.
I think you’ll that 6 trillion cigarettes is per year. Otherwise we’re talking like 1000 cigarettes per day for every person on the planet.
Well, I’m probably skewing the average. But yes, it’s annually.
Trees raised exclusively for pulp production make up about 15% of the market. The majority of the market is made up of mill waste. Saying they are cutting down a bunch of trees to make paper obfuscates the whole forest products industry. They are cutting down trees to make a variety of primary products from musical instruments to 2x4 studs. They have secondary markets for the waste. Transportation is the most costly part of utilizing secondary markets so your secondary market is generally the one that is closest. It might be a pulp, it might be energy, it might be particle board.
You’re right, “daily” was a mind glitch, and I later said “a year” which should clarify my intent.
While I’m picking nits, a cigarette paper is a lot lighter than a sixth of a gram. Cigarette paper basis weight is 25 grams per square meter, and a cigarette paper is 70 mm long and 35 mm wide, making slightly more than 400 cigarette papers per square meter of paper. It’s more like 1/16 gram per cigarette.
A million tons a year is outrageously high. Annual paper production for all uses is probably less than 400 million tons, and I refuse to believe that 0.25% of it goes to cigarette paper. If it’s even a half of that I’d be surprised, we’re talking about 400,000 tons tops and a lot of that doesn’t even come from wood pulp, it’s made from rice straw or hemp.