Tobacco´s Life Cycle of Destruction

TOBACCO'S LIFE CYCLE OF DESTRUCTION When you light up a cigarette, it's not just your personal health that's affected. Cigarettes have terrible consequences for the environment, too. GROWING TOBACCO Tobacco is primarily grown in low and middle income countries where it contributes to malnourishment, because the land is used to grow tobacco instead of food Tobacco is grown in 124 countries, taking up 3.8 million hectares of agricultural land, that's roughly the size of the entire country of Swit- zerland. 27 MILLION LBS. of pesticides are used on tobacco crops in the US, each year. That's because each crop requires 16 applications in just one 3-month growing season. 10 OZ. of pesticides for each of the 43.8 million US smokers, each year. Tasty! CURING TOBACCO 20,000 hectares of forest are cleared to cure tobacco annually. 600 MILLION TREES 1,000 TREES 1 TREE = 15 PACKS OF CIGARETTES are destroyed to dry tobacco leaves... are destroyed every minute for tobacco. R PRODUCING TOBACCO World tobacco production peaked in 1997 at over 9 million tons. 47X the weight of the Titanic 3-4 MILES of paper are used for rolling and packaging in just 1 hour of cigarette manufacturing. 2.5 MILLION TONS 1 YEAR of solid and chemical waste are produced worldwide per year to manufacture cigarettes. of cigarette manufacturing uses enough paper to circle the Earth once around the equator. TRANSPORTING TOBACCO Brazil is the largest exporter of tobacco leaf. The US is the largest exporter of manufactured cigarettes, accounting for almost 20% of the world total 42 BILLION PACKS OF CIGARETTES 14 MILLION TONS OF TOBACCO 1/5TH OF GREENHOUSE GASES are exported around the world each year. are produced by international trade. SMOKING TOBACCO One billion people worldwide smoke cigarettes. 19MG cigarettes are smoked each year, releasing 84,000 tons of pollution into the atmosphere, yearly. TRILLION of fine particulate matter is released by just one cigarette. 2X the amount of particulate matter released by traffic in California in 2011. DISPOSING CIGARETTES Cigarettes are the most common form of litter in the world. Billion a day 12.3 4.5 TRILLION CIGARETTES 12.3 BILLION A DAY are littered each year. That's... or enough to filL.. 32% OF ALL 2 EMPIRE STATE BUILDINGS MARINE DEBRIS collected during coastal clean-up efforts was comprised of cigarette butts. Marine debris kills one million birds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Filters left behind in cigarette butts are made of cellulose acetate, a kind of plastic which can take up to 15 years to decompose. 1 CIGARETTE The residue left in cigarette butts leaches toxic chemicals into water and soil, including arsenic, nicotine and heavy metals. contains enough chemicals to kill a fish inhabiting one liter of water in a matter of days DO YOURSELF AND THE PLANET A FAVOR! Try the 100% tobacco-free, recyclable and rechargeable GreenSmartLiving electronic cigarette. Visit greensmartliving.com to learn more. greensmartliving greensmartliving Sources: http://sdsu-dspace.calstateedu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10211.10/599/Slaughter_Elli.pdf?sequence=1. http://universe.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/news.aspx?s-71209 http://www.tobaccoatlas.org/uploads/Images/PDFS/Tobacco_Atlas 2ndPrint.pdf http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs339/en/ http://www.leavethepackbehind.org/tob_environment.php http://www.tobaccoatlasorg/industry/growing_tobacco/text/ http://scholargoogleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cacheub837KLWICEJscholargooglecom/+Cigarette+butts+can+leach+chemicals+such +as+cadmium,+lead+and+arsenic&h=es&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1 http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/outreach/pdfs/101FishLine.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1314901/ ---------------------------