Big Tobacco is killing the planet with plastics. No smokescreen should be allowed to hide that

theguardian.com:

The most common source of plastic pollution in our environment is not bottles, plastic bags or food wrappers, but cigarette butts. Smokers stub out nearly 800,000 metric tonnes of cigarettes every year, enough butts to cover New York’s Central Park. They are in every country on the planet, from city streets to rubbish tips, rivers and beaches.

Cigarettes contain single-use plastics because they are engineered and manufactured that way. Butts take a decade to degrade, releasing more than 7,000 toxic chemicals into the environment. Wildlife is also at risk: researchers found partly-digested cigarette butts in 70% of seabirds and 30% of sea turtles sampled for one study.

If cigarettes were treated appropriately as single-use plastics, they could theoretically be banned.

It’s not just cigarettes leaving a plastic trail. In South Asia, smokeless and chewing forms of tobacco such as gutka and khaini are sold in plastic pouches, millions of which litter the environment.

Vaping, electronic tobacco and nicotine products are creating a new wave of pollution, from the mining of materials for batteries to metal and plastic waste leaching into soil and water. In a report last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency highlighted how lithium ion batteries are entering municipal waste systems as consumers incorrectly dispose of electronic tobacco and nicotine products in the household bin, because they’re branded “disposable”.

The problem is global. Despite pledges from tobacco companies that they will eventually stop selling cigarettes, 6tn are produced every year. And manufacturing, sales and waste from electronic tobacco and nicotine products are increasing globally as tobacco giants seek to replace lost revenue as smokers quit or