From Plant to Waste: The Long and Diverse Impact Chain Caused by Tobacco Smoking

Abstract

Smoking is a social phenomenon of global scope. The impacts start from the cultivation of the plant to the disposal of cigarette butts in the most diverse places. These aspects go beyond economic and public health issues, also affecting natural environments and their biota in a serious and indistinct way. Of the six trillion cigarettes consumed globally each year, four and a half trillion are disposed somewhere in the environment. Cigarette butts are predominantly plastic, non-biodegradable waste, prevalent in coastal environments in various parts of the world, and with high potential for generating impacts on a wide range of socioeconomic and environmental aspects. Among the 5000 compounds found in a cigarette, those with higher toxic potential are mainly concentrated in the filter and in tobacco remnants, which are items found in discarded cigarette butts. After surveying published studies on this topic, the present study addressed the interaction between the impacts related to tobacco smoking, highlighting the problem as an important and emerging issue that demands joint efforts, and actions especially focused on the reduction of environmental impacts, an aspect that has not yet been assessed.

Abundance and Distribution of Cigarette Butts on Coastal Environments: Examples from Southern Spain

“…Moreover, this type of cleaning does not collect all the litter, as it leaves behind small-sized items such as plastic fragments, cotton bud sticks, bottle caps and CB [6,17,60,72,73] that are more efficiently recollected by manual clean-up operations [60,73]. The results also indicate that considering each beach typology, sandy beaches contain more CB items, which are frequently buried or semiburied in the sand [14,74]. In cobble beaches, the burial of (essentially) small items was also observed [75].…”

Litter origins, accumulation rates, and hierarchical composition on urban roadsides of the Inland Empire, California

“…Urban areas are the primary sources of anthropogenic litter that damages aquatic and terrestrial environments (Jambeck et al 2015, Rech et al 2015, Lebreton et al 2017, Cowger et al 2019. The source of all anthropogenic litter is at the production location (Araújo and Costa 2019). Production lines transform litter into various forms and transport it to a sale location.…”

Estimating and mapping cigarette butt littering in urban environments: A GIS approach

“…Tobacco harvesting leads to deforestation and to the use of harmful pesticides to the environment; and the manufacturing and distribution of tobacco products increases green-house gases emissions. (2,3) In addition, once the cigarettes are consumed, they remain in the environment as litter. Cigarette butts contain carcinogenic and toxic substances which can pollute the soil, the water and also damage the biota.…”