TIL Cigarette butts are the most common form of plastic pollution
TIL Cigarette butts are the most common form of plastic pollution
Cigarette butts are the most abundant form of plastic waste in the world, with about 4.5 trillion individual butts polluting our environment.
If you needed yet another reason to quit smoking, here it is.
You're viewing a single thread.
Just ban the filter. Let them smoke raw and unfiltered.
We should go back to using natural materials for filters, like asbestos. /s
Pretty typical response these days. "jUsT BaN iT!"
Yeah, let's make the number one lifestyle cause of death, a highly addictive group of substances, even more deadly! That'll show those no-good addicts!
Just like any other addiction, you don't cure tobacco smoking (or lessen the burden on society at large) by killing people faster.
Addiction treatment and other harm reduction, on the other hand..
Any smoker already knows they're killing themselves. Now it turns out their "filters" are harming us. I can't even use a plastic straw anymore for fuck's sake. Why not get rid of the filter?
Any smoker already knows they're killing themselves
Which is one of many reasons why the vast majority of smokers are trying to quit. I've never known anyone who's become addicted to nicotine who DIDN'T eventually want to stop.
Why not get rid of the filter?
Because it would increase the harm to both smokers and victims of passive tobacco inhalation immensely, which would in turn increase the already outsized strain on healthcare systems around the world, leading to a spiral of compounded misery throughout society.
It would be needlessly cruel while resulting in little to no benefit.
A better solution would be to ban the hundreds of different additives in cigarettes that make them more toxic and addictive than the tobacco itself already is.
That and roll back the bans of flavored e-juice while actively promoting the most effective smoking cessation method, adult vaping.
Refillable ones only, of course. Disposable vapes are an environmental scourge and also generally much less effective than the good ones.
I doubt that filters provide any real harm reduction beyond trapping a little bit of tar, quick internet search will confirm. They seem to do more harm than good when you consider their environmental impact. From my pov, keeping them around is needlessly cruel and results in no benefit whatsoever
any real harm reduction beyond trapping a little bit of tar
Yeah, just reducing the amount of TAR in your lungs!
Because that's not at all harmful, nuh-uh! It's not like emphysema or lung cancer ever harmed anyone! 🤦
They seem to do more harm than good
Objectively false to a ridiculous degree.
From my pov, keeping them around is needlessly cruel and results in no benefit whatsoever
Except for the aforementioned decrease in emphysema and lung cancer, sure 🙄
Bro don't cherry pick when quoting me, wth. They absolutely harm the environment more than help. Again smokers know the risk when they started smoking. They don't get to mitigate that risk by poisoning the environment with their trapped tar filters that they flick everywhere with out a care for themselves or nonsmokers or the environment.
You're wrong on this one
They absolutely harm the environment more than help
I highly doubt it, but go ahead and prove your claim.
Again smokers know the risk when they started smoking.
Far from all. That's a very privileged assumption. Countries in the global south don't generally get all the public health information we take for granted, and there's significant correlation between countries with the most new smokers and countries with the least successful public health authorities.
That goes for impoverished and otherwise dysfunctional parts of the global North too, btw, in case you don't think you'd be killing a lot of West Virginians who don't deserve it.
They don't get to mitigate that risk by poisoning the environment with their trapped tar filters that they flick everywhere with out a care for themselves or nonsmokers or the environment.
Holy stereotype bigotry, Batman!
Speaking as an ex-smoker who didn't match the caricature you have in your head at all, I'm glad that you didn't get to decide anything. Otherwise, I might not have survived long enough to quit five years ago.
You're wrong on this one
That's a negative. People don't deserve to be victims of social murder just because they made the mistake of developing a bad habit and you have prejudices against everyone who shares that habit.
You want proof that littering is bad for the environment? Really, that's the hill? Lmao.
Yes I make privileged assumptions and stereotypes. As do the healthcare workers and lawmakers when writing policies. Big things like these have to be generalized. I'm sure you understand that tackling smoking, smoking related diseases and policies at the individual level is nearly impossible.
Sorry uneducated smokers in the republic of whatever don't immediately affect me as much as you think they should. But packaging around (the vast majority of) the world has at least some warming on it. And it's WIDELY known that it's a bad idea to smoke.
Not sure why you're so hard about keeping filters around, but smokers anywhere aren't victims. They make the conscious decision to light up every single time and the actual victims are people who don't share their dirty murderous habit.
If you find yourself defending smoking in any way shape or form, you're wrong. Plain and simple.
I highly doubt it, but go ahead and prove your claim.
I would turn that around cause you are claiming filters help prevent cancer. Producers should prove that, but they don't. Filters don't help.
Speaking as an ex-smoker who didn't match the caricature
Good for you, but you are in the minority. I know no one that smokes that carry around a portable ashtray. If there is none in a couple of meters, they get thrown on the ground.
All my friends who smoke, and I, do not litter the butts ever. We put them in our pocket until we find a trash can, just like everyone should be doing with any of their trash anyway. I'm not defending the people who litter, but there are plenty of smokers out there that are more considerate.
If we were serious about getting people to quit, it would be better to force producers to slowly decrease the nicotine content, and the other addictive additives used in cigarettes. Of course the producers lobby and sue governments trying to limit them in any way.
At least for me, I'm much more addicted to the ritual and the motions of smoking than I am the nicotine. I'm sure this isn't true for everybody. I know this because the first time I quit by vaping, I started with high nicotine juice and pretty quickly went down to 0% nicotine. Stopping the act of vaping was almost as hard as stopping cigarettes.
Or, and hear me out here, since no one would die from withdrawal and the product has no medicinal benefits and directly causes adverse health outcomes with no redeeming qualities: stop production completely.
I spent over 20 years enslaved to nicotine. Now that I'm free, I don't want to see anyone else have to go through it.
If we were serious about getting people to quit, it would be better to force producers to slowly decrease the nicotine content, and the other addictive additives used in cigarettes
Or better yet: do both. We can walk and chew nicotine gum at the same time, you know 😉
Smoking with a filter has no health benefits. Statistically, there are even more illnesses with people that smoke with filter cause they on average smoke more cause it irritates the throat less.
Our local cancer NGO even lobbied to ban filtered sigarettes as they cause more smoking and are plastic litter.
Light cigarettes are even worse. Less harsh than regular filtered, light cigarettes have little holes on the paper around the filter that dilute the smoke with more air, but people end up inhaling harder to get the same dose of nicotine they would get with a regular cigarette, and the smoke ends up going deeper in the lungs.
Being very cynical, how does killing them faster not lessen the burden on society at large? It's a burden I'm glad we choose to bear, but just literally mathematically, the amount spent worldwide on treating people with smoking damage is astronomical.
Statistically, it's at least possible that the amount of cost saved by killing some smokers faster could be offset by causing other smokers to need medical treatment who would otherwise have avoided it.
The problem would fix itself.