Tobacco Doesn’t Just Kill Smokers; It Kills the Environment

About 90% of all lung cancers are caused by cigarette smoking. Smoking kills 7 million people a year, speeds aging, destroys the heart and cardiovascular system, and leads to asthma and COPD. But cigarettes don’t just wreak havoc on the human body; they also wreak havoc on the environment through deforestation, pollution, and littering. [1] [2]

In May, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a study detailing the environmental costs of tobacco, adding to the mind-blowing $1.4 trillion in healthcare costs and lost productivity. The report looks at the immediate environmental damage caused by tobacco consumption, as well as “the post-consumption waste and health implications that continue to play out long after the tobacco has been smoked.” [3]

WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said:

“Tobacco threatens us all. Tobacco exacerbates poverty, reduces economic productivity, contributes to poor household food choices, and pollutes indoor air.” [2]

Source: TobaccoFreeCo.org

A few of the main take-aways from the report:

• There are more than 7,000 toxic chemicals in tobacco waste – some of them cancer-causing – and these substances also pollute the environment.

• Tobacco smoke has created thousands of tons of human carcinogens, toxicants, and greenhouse gases.

• Cigarette butts and other tobacco waste account for a huge amount of trash. According to a 2014 study, tobacco waste constitutes more than a third of the refuse collected during coastal cleanups. Additionally, nearly two-thirds of all cigarettes purchased every day wind up tossed in the streets, grass, and water. Too few people “flick their butts” into a trash receptacle. [3]

Tobacco-leaf curing requires burning enormous quantities of wood, which contributes to deforestation. Larger tobacco growers also use coal, which emits carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas implicated in global warning. [4]

Read: The True Cost of Smoking Revealed

As if that’s not disgusting enough, the planet is littered with millions of kilograms of non-biodegradable cigarette butts.

Pollution aside, tobacco is a drain on the world’s resources, including energy and water, and requires the extensive use of harmful chemicals. [2]

The report states:

“From start to finish, the tobacco life cycle is an overwhelmingly polluting and damaging process.” [4]

Mammoth amounts of insecticides, herbicides, GMOs, fungicides, and fumigants are applied to tobacco plants. Many of these products are so harmful to health and the environment that they’ve been banned in some countries.

The WHO is calling on world governments to work toward controlling tobacco pollution by enacting measures such as banning tobacco marketing and advertising, promoting plain product packaging, and making all public spaces and workplaces smoke-free. [3]

World health experts are also urging governments to implement tobacco taxes. It is one of the least-used tobacco control methods, but raising tobacco taxes and prices is remarkably effective, according to Dr. Oleg Chestnov, the WHO’s Assistant Director-General for NCDs and Mental Health.

At the moment, governments rake in about $270 billion in yearly tobacco excise tax revenues. But the WHO says this could increase by more than 50% to bring in an additional $141 billion by simply increasing taxes on packs of cigarettes by $0.80 a pack.

Additionally, the WHO wants to make it mandatory for tobacco companies to supply information on the amount of environmental damage their operations contribute to. At the moment, some large manufacturers do report on their use of environmental resources and waste streams, but ‘the data is limited and opaque.” [4]

The authors wrote:

“All producers should be required to compensate for the environmental harms caused by deforestation, water use, waste, etc. through offsets in order to ultimately reduce the long-term ecological harm their business causes.” [4]

Read: Tobacco Industry Forced to List Ingredients in their Products

Chan said:

“By taking robust tobacco control measures, governments can safeguard their countries’ futures by protecting tobacco users and non-users from these deadly products, generating revenues to fund health and other social services, and saving their environments from the ravages tobacco causes.” [3]

Sources:

[1] Web MD

[2] CNN

[3] Consumerist

[4] RTT News

TobaccoFreeCo.org

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

Investigation Brews over Insecticide-Tainted Eggs Distributed Throughout U.K.

Eggs contaminated with a potentially harmful insecticide were imported from Europe and have been distributed throughout the United Kingdom and other countries, according to England’s Food Standards Agency (FSA). [1]

The number of eggs containing the insecticide fipronil, used in flea and tick products, is thought to be very small, thank goodness, but grocers in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland have had to pull millions of eggs from store shelves as a precaution.

It is believed that fipronil was used on chickens in Belgium.

The FSA claims the risk to human health is extremely low.

The agency said:

“The number of eggs involved represents about 0.0001% of the eggs imported into the UK each year.

Our risk assessment, based on all the information available, indicates that as part of a normal healthy diet this low level of potential exposure is unlikely to be a risk to public health and there is no need for consumers to be concerned.”

The FSA said that based on the findings of its investigation so far, the affected eggs are no longer available for purchase.

The contamination was kept a secret for weeks and did not trigger the European Union’s (EU) international food safety alert system, allegedly due to a fraud investigation.

Belgium’s agriculture minister said he had ordered the country’s food safety agency to explain why it waited until July 20, 2017 to inform neighboring countries of the problem, when it was aware of the problem back in June.

A criminal investigation has been launched.

Food security expert, professor Chris Elliott, said:

“The report indicated that it (fipronil) should not be used in any food-producing animal of any description, so the Belgian authorities are following a line of investigation to say that there was illegal use… it was actually some serious fraud that was happening somewhere between Belgium and the Netherlands.

All of the information from the food safety authorities right across Europe is that consuming the eggs is not going to endanger anybody’s health.

I’m confident wherever you are in Europe or in the UK, enjoy your eggs.”

Fipronil is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be moderately toxic to humans. The pesticide can damage the kidneys, liver, and lymph glands, and may cause symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and eye irritation. [2]

The FSA said on its website:

“The government has already taken action to prevent any risk to UK consumers by adding fipronil to its robust surveillance program in UK farms.

We have no evidence that eggs laid in the UK are contaminated or that fipronil has been used inappropriately in the UK. Eighty-five per cent of the eggs we consume in the UK are laid here.”

Several million hens may need to be killed at 150 companies in Belgium, a Dutch farming company has said. About 300,000 have already been put down. [1]

Sources:

[1] Sky News

[2] Independent

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

Globalism & Pesticides Are Behind Massive Honeybee Die-Off, Bayer Study Confirms

Authored by Michael Hart and StockBoardAsset via StockBoardAsset.com,

Despite Big Agriculture claiming for years that their pesticides only kill pests, a report published in late June in the Journal Science proved what many people have suspected for years: the type of pesticides that Bayer pioneered, known as neonicotinoids, are responsible for diminishing numbers of honeybees.

“Two studies, conducted on different crops and on two continents … find that bees near corn crops are exposed to neonicotinoids for 3 to 4 months via nontarget pollen, resulting in decreased survival and immune responses, especially when co-exposed to a commonly used agrochemical fungicide.” the report said.

The studies even found neonicotinoid residue inside of hives where no chemicals had been used nearby. The study also noted that the presence of these insecticide residues was correlated with fewer queen bees in the hives and fewer egg cells in solitary bees nests.

This comes on the heels of the United States placing the rusty patched bumblebee on the endangered species list earlier this year.

This is especially troubling, because bees are responsible for pollinating nearly 75 percent of all crops grown for human and animal consumption worldwide.

And US honeybee colonies have been on a steady decline for the last four decades, as this chart illustrates:

However, perhaps the major contributing factor to not only the threats facing the honeybee but also many other species of plants and animals is the threat of globalization. A 2012 report in the journal Nature noted the following:

“Here we show that a significant number of species are threatened as a result of international trade along complex routes, and that, in particular, consumers in developed countries cause threats to species through their demand of commodities that are ultimately produced in developing countries. We linked 25,000 Animalia species threat records from the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List to more than 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries and evaluated more than 5 billion supply chains in terms of their biodiversity impacts. Excluding invasive species, we found that 30% of global species threats are due to international trade.”

This map shows the species threat hotspots caused by US consumption. The darker the color, the greater the threat caused by the consumption. The magenta color represents terrestrial species, while the blue represents marine species.
Credit: Daniel Moran and Keiichiro Kanemoto

While the Donald Trump presidency has placed the spotlight on the ways in which globalist policies have harmed the economies of the US as well as many other countries in the developed world, we tend to overlook the ways in which the demand for cheaper and more goods from the developing world harm our environment.  Indeed, the Trump era has ushered in a demand not only for political decentralization, but also for the decentralization of our media, our currencies, and now our food supply as the damage of agricultural centralization becomes apparent. Our demand for 99 cent hamburgers has taken us to the edge of total ecological collapse, and at this point it is unclear if the damage is irreversable.

An interesting development over the last few years has seen large cities in the US most acutely ravaged by globalist policies, such as Detroit and Baltimore, turning derilect buildings within the city into multiacre urban farms as a solution to growing food insecurity within these deindustrialized urban centers. Urban flight from these cities over the years has facilitated the use of large swaths of the city to satiate demand for locally produced fresh produce, and has led to the growth of many year-round farmers markets that have helped to increase food security in these areas while decreasing dependence on these global agribusiness cartels. It seems that some of the Districts in our Hunger Games society are attempting to gain independence from the Capital.

Urban farms, such as this one in Baltimore, have increased food security in cities that have been hit hard by globalism and free trade.

Certainly, as we have noted before in previous columns, we are living in an era where massive change is taking place in almost every sphere of human activity. Right now is the critical juncture in which we will decide whether power will be returned to the people, or will be further consolidated into the hands of those who wish to micromanage every aspect of the human and natural world for their own private gain. The fight for control over the food supply is just one of many battlegrounds in this war for the future of the planet and our lives. Growing public awareness about the dangers of these pesticides as well as GMOs, and an increased demand for locally produced organic agriculture are signs that the public is waking up and understanding the great peril that agricultural centralization poses to not only our health, but the health and wellbeing of our entire planet.