Smoking is an expensive habit for both your pocket and the environment. Take a look...
Your money
If you smoke the amount of cigarettes below then you are shelling out:
- 5 cigarettes a day for 1 year = £644
- 10 cigarettes a day for 1 year = £1289
- 20 cigarettes a day for 1 year = £2577
Think of all that extra money you could be using for holidays, clothes, gadgets and football season tickets!
And scarily enough, if you smoked 40 cigarettes a day for 10 years you would have spent £67,748, so instead of burning this money you could have almost bought your own flat.
These calculations were based on a pack of 20 cigarettes costing between £5.50 and £6. To find out more use the Cost Calculator to see what this means for you or your family.
If all that makes you want to stop smoking, see the links below for help.
The cost to the environment
Deforestation
Producing tobacco involves cutting down lots of trees. Forests are cleared to grow tobacco but the biggest problem is the number of trees that are cut down for fuel to dry tobacco. Tobacco is cured (dried) by heating the tobacco through burning wood. Nearly nine million acres of forests are cut down each year for fuel for curing.
Pollution and wildlife
- Tobacco farmers need to use lots of fertiliser and pesticides to protect the tobacco as it grows. With food crops the use of chemicals is strictly monitored. Tobacco isn’t a food crop so this means it isn’t controlled as much and the chemicals can get into the local water supply.
- 2,700 tonnes of cigarette litter is dropped in London alone each year. Some people think that cigarette filters are biodegradable (able to decompose/break up naturally) Cigarette filters are made of a form of plastic that takes more than 10 years to biodegrade.
- Cigarette butts have been found in the stomachs of fish, birds, whales and other sea creatures, who mistake them for food.
Labour
Around 86% of the world’s tobacco is grown in the developing world. Producing tobacco can be expensive so tobacco farmers use child labour to cut costs. Children working on tobacco plantations often miss school and have to carry out the same work an adult does. Tobacco harvesters can be affected by Green Tobacco sickness. People who harvest tobacco leaves absorb the nicotine through their skin, causing a variety of symptoms including vomiting, dizziness, headaches and difficulty breathing.
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