Dealing with the harms of smoking is extensive and well-known, but this time a publication by the World Health Organization (WHO) does indeed also deal with the harms of smoking, but what led me to deal with it was the report on the environmental damages in the cultivation and processing of tobacco.
Smoking and other uses of tobacco cause the death of approximately 7 million people each year, making tobacco a preventable cause of death. Smokers emit thousands of tons of toxins and carcinogens into the air as well as greenhouse gases. Smoking causes damage to the economy of approximately 1.5 billion dollars as a result of the costs of treating diseases and lost working days.
The numbers will increase when in 2030 80% of the dead will be in developing countries, whose population is subject to an advertising attack by the cigarette companies. According to the organization, tough measures are needed to curb the use of tobacco, the organization calls on countries to ban smoking in workplaces and public spaces, ban the marketing of tobacco products and raise cigarette prices. According to the CEO of the organization, "Tobacco exacerbates poverty, harms the economy, contributes to the wrong choice of foods and pollutes the air in closed spaces."
All of this is known and recognized and again what makes me engage in this is the fact that for the first time the organization is dealing with environmental damage. The huge ones caused by the increase in the processing and distribution of tobacco products. From start to finish, the tobacco life cycle causes pollution on a massive scale.
It starts with the huge amounts of fertilizers and insecticides that are required in growing tobacco, and continues with the fact that there are countries where growing tobacco is one of the main causes of deforestation to create growing areas but more so because of the use of trees in the tobacco processing process.
According to the organization, in order to process tobacco to make 300 cigarettes - one tree is burned. Added to this is the pollution emitted during the production, transportation and distribution of tobacco products. It is estimated that the tobacco industry causes the emission of 4 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, an amount equal to the emission of three million transatlantic flights.
The waste thrown away at the end of the process contains 7,000 toxic chemicals, some of which are carcinogenic.
When you count the cigarette butts and the filters, you get the highest number of waste units, the filters make up 40% of all items collected on beaches and cities. The remains of two-thirds of the 15 million cigarettes sold every day are thrown on the streets or in open spaces.
In light of these data, the organization repeats and urges governments to take drastic measures to moderate and reduce the use of tobacco.
So much for the main points of the organization's report, while I add that it is worth remembering that many farmers in developing countries make a living solely from growing tobacco and it is appropriate to provide them with a suitable replacement.
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Avi, Mickey and Shani your comments are good!
I will add to this the need for immediate legislation banning the production of synthetic filters for occlusion (even this has not been proven to be effective) and I also agree with the approach that there is no reason to "soften" smokers the act of self-destruction they chose for themselves. If smokers take other innocents to the grave with them, we really have nothing to pity them just like we have no reason to pity a suicide terrorist (the former in a slow and prolonged process and the latter in a faster and more visible process).
Good and many before us (as usual) have already thought of workable solutions before us. All that is left for us is to actually copy the successful ways of treating this bundle of trouble that is so offensive to the environment. Nor should we be deterred from trying to create improvements and inventions in them that are the fruit of our Jewish thought! There are authorities that have regulated corporate responsibility for the closure manufacturers in regards to financing the collection, transportation and proper treatment of the toxic waste that the tobacco companies invented for the world - after all, you invented and created it; You earn a huge fortune from this (!) You will also pay from this fortune for the treatment of the trouble you caused! No longer will the innocent suffer the burden! A deposit of 12 cents for every cigarette butt will certainly be an incentive for collectors to make them disappear wherever they are found.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3088406
http://council.vancouver.ca/20130625/documents/motionb2.pdf
The website of the association working to eradicate the phenomenon: http://bdal.org.il
I hope that Israel will also be able to do what is required as soon as possible. There is no reason to delay at all
If the filters constitute a huge amount of waste that pollutes the cities, beaches and the sea. Obviously, what is needed is to ban the creation of cigarettes with them.
Those who smoke, in any case, do not protect their health and their superiors. Why should the others and nature suffer from having to soften and ease their slow suicide.
And if it makes it difficult for smokers, to a large extent it might motivate them to quit smoking.
There is no reason in the world that the price of the environmental destruction caused by the dubious pleasure should be paid by those who are not responsible for it.
(Not to mention the huge costs for health expenses that smokers burden all of us with their care)
Indeed, one of the issues in the international convention against smoking deals with finding alternatives to tobacco crops, for example growing strawberries or echinacea, etc., which bring in more money for the farmer than growing tobacco on the same area of land.
Why don't you see propaganda films against smoking and the harms of smoking?
From time to time they are satisfied with a few placards or stupid warnings of the Israel Defense Forces on the cigarette boxes, and that's all.
Why don't Leonardo DiCaprio and Schwarzenegger be recruited to make elaborate propaganda films against tobacco and smoking, instead of propaganda films about global warming and CO2 emissions, a subject that the common man has nothing to do against? (Apart from stopping breathing, which is a little harder than stopping smoking)