![]() He pointed to documents showing that the R.J. Hendlin agreed that change was only likely to come through legislative pressure. “It's a major intervention that I think could work,” he says. ![]() He also notes the environmental benefits, and has argued for a ban on single-use plastic filters, a step that the California state senate is currently considering. They may even be making the problem worse because they make smoking a less harsh experience and give people a sense that they are doing less harm. Tobacco companies, Novotny said, tried a variety of different filter materials, such as cotton, charcoal, and food starch, before landing on a plastic fiber called cellulose acetate, which remains the polymer of choice today.įilters, he said, haven’t been shown to improve health outcomes. “There was this whole attempt to reduce tar and nicotine,” says Tom Novotny, an epidemiologist at San Diego State University who was one of the first people to research the environmental impacts of cigarettes.īy the late 1950s, sales of filtered cigarettes had overtaken those of unfiltered cigarettes. By 1964 the agency had commissioned and released a comprehensive report highlighting “a 70 percent increase in the mortality rate of smokers over non-smokers.”Īs public concern mounted, the tobacco companies scrambled for solutions, one of which was cigarette filters. In 1957 the Surgeon General officially declared a causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Starting in the late 1930s, scientists began making connections between cigarettes and public health risks. But, slowly, the health impacts of smoking became clear. For most of that period, cigarette filters were nonexistent. By 1960, that number had climbed to more than 4,000. In 1900 American adults smoked an average of 54 cigarettes per year. The 20th century saw an explosion of smoking. But the invention of the cigarette rolling machine at the end of the century-which drastically increased production-started the cigarette on its path to popularity. By the 1800s paper cigarettes had joined cigars, pipes, and snuff as common forms of tobacco consumption. People have been smoking or chewing tobacco for millennia. “It's just a different form of the same thing.” From tobacco to plastics “It's becoming so pervasive,” says Zipf, of both e-cigarette use and the accompanying plastic waste. The pollution problem has only gotten worse in recent years as e-cigarettes have become more popular, she said, because those too are largely made of plastic. “They look a lot more like a morsel of food on a sea surface,” says Zipf.
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