What exactly is the point of cigarette filters?

Cigarette butts are the single most littered item on the planet, with an estimated 4.5 trillion discarded each year.

Cigarette filters were widely introduced in the 1950s, ostensibly to make smoking less harmful.

With growing public concern about lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases, the tobacco industry responded not by making cigarettes safer, but by making them seem safer. Filters were the perfect innovation – not for health, but for public relations.

Over 70 years later, we know that filters don’t reduce harm. In fact, they may exacerbate some risks.

By softening smoke and making it easier to inhale deeply, filters may actually raise the risk of lung cancer.

In the early 1950s, one popular filter type even contained asbestos. Despite this, most smokers today still believe filters make cigarettes safer.

Beyond the health deception, cigarette filters create an environmental disaster. They’re made of a plastic called cellulose acetate. They don’t biodegrade but break down into microplastics, polluting our rivers and oceans.

And there are a lot of them. Cigarette butts are the single most littered item on the planet. An estimated 4.5 trillion are discarded each year, and roughly 800,000 metric tonnes of this plastic waste enters the environment annually.

While legislation has restricted other single-use plastics like bottles, bags and straws, cigarette filters have largely escaped such regulatory attention.

Under pressure, some tobacco companies now market “biodegradable” filters made from new materials. But these are a false solution.

Even so-called biodegradable filters offer no health benefit and continue to pollute ecosystems. They serve the industry by creating an illusion of environmental responsibility, all while maintaining the false perception that filters themselves are benign or necessary.

Banning cigarette filters would remove the illusion of safety from filtered cigarettes. It could reduce smoking prevalence, as unfiltered cigarettes are generally harsher and less palatable.

And it would eliminate one of the most widespread sources of plastic pollution, preventing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste each year.

If we can ban plastic straws, surely, we can ban cigarette filters.

https://www.the-independent.com/…/cigarette-filters…