|
|
An appropriate title for this could have been "Seeing the trees
but not the forest".
June 2002
Dear Senator Legarda,
Last June 5, World Environment Day, I saw the Luntiang
Pilipinas ad in the newspapers featuring the launch of the Green Crusaders.
On behalf of our Alliance's members and partners, please accept my congratulations
on this latest development for a greener Philippines. All Filipinos who
help clean up the local environment are to be congratulated.
I am writing, however, to address a related issue, which
is LP's partnership with Philip Morris.
No congratulations are in order for Philip Morris (or
any other tobacco company) for their highly publicized participation!
It is supremely ironic that one of the world's biggest polluters is attempting
to gain an improved public image by such a cheap stunt.
If the tobacco industry sincerely wanted to clean up the
environment, it would have to put itself out of business! The following
are only some of many ways known to environmentalists worldwide in which
Big Tobacco pollutes our environment:
| * |
Indoor
tobacco smoke pollution. Smoking inside any building or room prevents
adequate dispersal of the smoke, creating a concentration of the poisons
and pollutants, and endangering the health of anyone who must share
that environment. Smoke and chemicals also penetrate fabrics in the
room, leaving a tobacco stench behind which is offensive to non-smokers. |
| * |
Tobacco
manufacturing produces enormous amounts of environmental toxic waste.
In 1995, the global tobacco industry produced about 2.3 billion kilograms
of manufacturing waste, 209 million kilograms of chemical waste and
300 million kilograms of nicotine waste. |
| * |
Each
year, in an international environmental cleanup, cigarette butts are
the most common item found, representing at least 12% of total items
collected since data collection began. In 1997, over 6 million pieces
of trash were removed from 5000 sites around the world. Cigarette
butts accounted for 19.1% of these items. |
| * |
Cigarette
butts are a major pollutant of waterways. They can take 25 years to
break down because of the plastic (cellulose acetate) filters in them.
The poisons in cigarette butts are harmful to aquatic life and are
not biodegradable. Fish can mistake them for food and eat them. Small
children also sometimes swallow cigarette butts and suffer health
problems as a result. An estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are
littered worldwide every year. Yes, blame it on smokers being careless.
But the tobacco industry cannot escape its share of the blame. |
| * |
In countries like Australia and the United
States, forest fires are a frequent danger. Many of these fires are
caused by lighted cigarette butts dropped in the bush or thrown out
of car windows. Some of these fires are fatal to humans. All pollute
the atmosphere unnecessarily as well as causing damage to the local
forests and killing wildlife. |
| * |
The tobacco industry contributes to global
environmental degradation through deforestation. The trees cut down
are largely used in curing tobacco leaves. Tobacco must be cured before
it can be used for smoking. In developing countries it is mostly through
flue curing - that is heat from fires in special barns. The most common
fuel is wood. |
| * |
About 11.4 million tonnes of wood are
used by the tobacco industry each year to cure tobacco. About half
of this is taken from open woodlands and native forests. Much of this
is in developing countries, where re-forestation is rare. Tree-planting
often coincides with food and tobacco crop planting season, and farmers
don't feel it is important. Where re-forestation is attempted, it
is often not effective, because old trees are replaced with saplings
which will again be cut down within 10 years. Often the trees are
not the same kinds as those removed, and the environment is not maintained,
but drastically changed. Wildlife habitats are permanently destroyed. |
| * |
Cigarette packaging alone contributes
to deforestation: a modern cigarette manufacturing machine uses 4
miles of paper per hour; over 350,000 tonnes of paper are used each
year to wrap cigarettes. Much of this winds up as rubbish littering
the countryside. Even worse is the plastic wrap on many brands of
cigarettes, as it is not usually bio-degradable. |
| * |
An estimated 200,000 hectares (or 2,000
square kilometers) of forests and woodlands are removed by tobacco
farming each year. In real terms, 1 carton of cigarettes costs one
large forest tree to produce. This is a huge, continuing and unsustainable
loss to the environment. |
| * |
Worse, the cut down timber is often replaced
with tobacco growing. Tobacco is a very greedy plant - it removes
nutrients from the soil faster than almost any other crop. This damages
soil fertility. So farmers have to continually buy and use fertilisers.
These run off and pollute waterways too. Pesticides have to be used
in large quantity. Many of the commonly used pesticides (Aldicarb,
Chlorpyrifos, and 1,3-D) are pollutants which can make people sick,
as well as damage the environment. |
Philip Morris' hypocrisy in promoting their "help" to
clean up just a little of the damage they cause is sickening. Luntiang
Pilipinas would do well to dissociate itself from Philip Morris and reject
any future collaboration with it.
Yours sincerely,
Ulysses Dorotheo, MD
FCTC Alliance, Philippines (FCAP)
|
