Plastic pollution from cigarettes likely costs $26 billion per year, finds study

Although great strides have been made in developing policies to curb or ban single use plastics around the globe, tobacco's plastic has been overlooked, the researchers said.

New Delhi: The costs of environmental pollution caused by plastics in cigarette butts and packaging amount to an estimated $26 billion every year, according to a study.

The analysis, published in the journal Tobacco Control, found the costs to be $186 billion every 10 years—adjusted for inflation—in waste management and marine ecosystem damage worldwide.

These costs may seem small compared with the overall economic and human toll of tobacco, but they are cumulative and preventable, the researchers said.

Although great strides have been made in developing policies to curb or ban single use plastics around the globe, tobacco's plastic has been overlooked, they said.

The team noted that this is despite the fact that cigarette filters—the main component of cigarette butts—are the most common item of rubbish collected on the planet. And they are made of single use plastic.

The researchers drew on currently available public data sources for cigarette sales, clean-up costs, and plastic waste on land and sea.

These sources included the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),The Tobacco Atlas, and the World Wildlife Fund.

The researchers estimated the annual and 10-year projections of the environmental and economic costs of tobacco plastic.

Ten-year projections were included because cigarette butts are reported to take 10 years to degrade.

The researchers estimated that the annual economic cost of cigarette plastics waste is around $26 billion, made up of $20.7 billion in marine ecosystem damage and $5 billion in waste management costs, adding up to $186 billion over 10 years.

“Although this amount is small compared with the annual economic losses from tobacco (USD 1.4 trillion per year) and may appear insignificant compared with the 8 million deaths attributable to tobacco each year, these environmental costs should not be downplayed as these are accumulating and are preventable,” said Deborah K Sy, from Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control, Thailand.

Countries with the highest number of cigarette butts are mostly low and middle income countries -- the same where the ‘leakage’ rate for plastics into the environment, thought to be between 1 and14 per cent, is likely higher, she adds.

The costs of tobacco product plastic pollution are likely highest in China, Indonesia, Japan, Bangladesh and the Philippines, the estimates suggest.

The researchers acknowledge that the figures are only estimates, but they are likely to be conservative, because they don't account for the toxic metals and chemicals in cigarette butts that accrue over time, making them more harmful than general plastic waste.