In 2004 NewScientist reported that air pollution emitted by cigarettes is 10 times greater than diesel car exhaust. Medical News Today also published the story and went further to give more a bit more facts, reporting that in a controlled experiment set up by a group of Italian scientists. They left a turbo diesel 2 litre engine idle in ignited condition in a closed garage for thirty minutes and then proceeded to open the doors and allowing ventilation for next four hours. In subsequent part of experiment they lit three filter cigarettes and recorded the air quality after one hour.
In the first case combined particles levels in the first hour after the engine was started was 88 ug/m3 and with cigarettes it was 880 ug/m3.
I will not talk on the cigarette filter pollution or the deforestation for tobacco plantation which reportedly is responsible for 2-4% of global deforestation itself. Rather I will limit this blogpost to an incident which I recall at Helsinki Airport.
I was waiting for my flight back to India with a couple of my friends. Tired of the same faces around I took a stroll and finally settled at a couch which interestingly gave me a direct peep into a glass chamber where a proud font displayed the words: Smoking Zone.
It was nothing that very interesting. Most public places do have this zone to save the passive smokers. But then something else crossed my mind: cigarette emissions. I sat there for 30 minutes, between 1715 and 1745 hours of 11th July 2012. I spotted 17, 8 males and 7 females, smokers going in and out at different times. One of the ladies smoked two joints. So in a span of 1800 seconds 18 cigarettes were smoked up!
Now a bit of high school mathematics please:
– In a span of 24 hours it can be expected that 864 cigarettes should be smoked up in that glass chamber. Introduce a 16.67% error and we are still left with 720. So let’s assume that on an average Helsinki Airport smoking zone supports 720 cigarettes.
– Now in a regular year of 365 days, we have 262, 800 cigarettes burnt up in the chamber.
– Helsinki Airport is not yet listed among the 50 busiest airports. So there is a fair chance that rest of the airports may be supporting much greater number of cigarettes. But let’s take into consideration 40 such airports and assume this modest figure of 262,800 cigarettes being burnt up in smoking zones annually.
– That gives us a number greater than 10 millions! 10 millions cigarettes innocently are smoked up. And this is the most least calculated number. Also there is a fair possibility that airports support more than 1 smoking zone…so there we go 😀
Now 3 cigarettes is reportedly 10 times potentially dangerous than 2 litre diesel engine running for 30 minutes. Now what does 10 million cigarettes tell us? This tells us that that engine had to be left ignited and idle on low sulfur fuel for 190 years without break. And did I mention that this is the ultra-low estimation.
Anyway, FYI I read somewhere recently that smoking releases about 2.6 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide annually into the atmosphere. And 5.2 billion kilograms of methane. Hello Global Warming 😀
Rework of an article published by UNEP Tunza while serving as Regional Ambassador to India.
What we should know about Climate Change 