Health

By Kennedy Nnamani

THE WHO has revealed that tobacco industries are responsible and should be accountable for the destruction of both human health and environment across the globe.

In a press statement on Tuesday, the organization revealed new information on the extent to which tobacco damages both the environment and human health and called for steps to make the industry more accountable for this damage.

According to the statement, tobacco industry costs the world more than 8 million human lives, 600 million trees, 200 000 hectares of land, 22 billion tonnes of water and 84 million tonnes of CO2 yearly. 

WHO, in the statement, accused the industries of depriving humans and plants of portable water, food and farmland, especially in developing nations.

“The majority of tobacco is grown in low-and-middle-income countries, where water and farmland are often desperately needed to produce food for the region. Instead, they are being used to grow deadly tobacco plants, while more and more land is being cleared of forests,” the statement said.

The world health body further highlighted that the industry’s carbon footprint from production, processing and transporting tobacco is equivalent to one-fifth of the CO2 produced by the commercial airline industry each year which further contributes to global warming. 

Dr Ruediger Krech, Director of Health Promotion at WHO, noted that about 4.5 trillion cigarette filters pollute the oceans, rivers, city sidewalks, parks, soil and beaches every year.

“Tobacco products are the most littered item on the planet, containing over 7000 toxic chemicals, which leech into our environment when discarded,” he said.

While emphasizing that filters have no proven health benefits, WHO calls on policy-makers to treat cigarette filters as single use plastics and consider banning them to protect public health and the environment.

WHO therefore urged countries and cities to emulate France, Spain, San Francisco, California who have adopted the Polluter Pays Principle which makes the tobacco industry responsible for clearing up the pollution it creates to relieve taxpayers of the costs of cleaning up littered tobacco.

WHO advised countries and cities to follow this example, as well as give support to tobacco farmers to switch to sustainable crops, implement strong tobacco taxes (that could also include an environmental tax) and offer support services to help people quit tobacco.

The table below presents estimates of tobacco product waste (TPW) attributable costs in one country from each of the WHO regions. These estimates are based on the “proportional estimation” approach, which starts with an estimate of the costs of total litter (“all product waste,” or APW) for each country, and then applies an estimate of the proportion of all litter that is TPW (i.e., a TPW “weight”)

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Tags: Dr Ruediger Krech Kennedy Nnamani WHO