Can tobacco be a green buzz?

Obviously drugs — even the legal ones — aren’t very good for you, and most will get you arrested (or worse), but rumor has it that some citizens still take them anyway. So, with that in mind, the least you can do is work towards a more sustainable habit. To see all the substances we’ve covered in that series, see our Guide to Green Green Drug Use.

Last week Patrick did a great post on the questionable green-ness (greenosity? greenitudinousness?) of cigarettes. As he noted, tobacco growing is a carbon-intensive monoculture and cigarette production is an intensive industrial process. Moreover, cigarette butts are non-biodegradable and build up at a truly insane rate. So, no, cigarettes really aren’t green.

However, as a former smoker, a former resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and a born contrarian, I feel like it’s my responsibility to see whether there are ways in which tobacco consumption can be made green. As I understand it, the problems with tobacco are that it is a monoculture, uses a lot of carbon in its cultivation, is generally smoke-cured (which results in the atmospheric release of carbon), is produced in a technology-intensive process, and leaves behind a lot of non-degradable mess.

Monoculture: There really isn’t much that can be done about that, and it’s hard to mitigate the environmental effects of tobacco. After all, in most of the places where it’s grown, it is the primary or sole crop. It depletes the soil, which requires the addition of large quantities of fertilizer; in most cases, that is non-organic. Worse yet, it is common for tobacco cultivators to add apatite, a phosphate, to the soil to starve the plant for nitrogen. In addition to potentially poisoning the end-user, apatite may have a deleterious effect upon the soil. On the bright side, some companies, such as Sotoya and American Spirit, offer organic tobacco.

Curing, Production and Transportation: Most tobacco is cured. Traditionally, that has been done either with a flow of air or with fire, both of which are still used in some areas. While air curing is non-polluting, fire curing uses wood, which means that it releases carbon into the atmosphere. Nowadays, most curing is

done with industrial curing machines. As with any other industrial process, that uses electricity, with all its attendant hazards. However, electric curing is probably far more sustainable than the more traditional fire curing.

While cigarettes are clearly the worst tobacco offenders when it comes to industrial production and waste, most forms of tobacco are the end aftereffect of an industrial process; while it is certainly possible to find non-processed tobaccos, it is fairly hard to do. That having been said, the industrial processes used to produce most tobacco products are no more intense than those used to form, say, a jar of relish or a bottle of ketchup.

On the other hand, many tobacco products are packaged in plastic containers, and the gas used to transport them to market is far from negligible. Unless you live near tobacco fields in Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, or Connecticut, your tobacco is probably being transported across a considerable distance, which is something that you might want to consider when you load up your pipe.

Burning: The final touch, of course, is the method of consumption. Needless to say, pipes, hookahs, cigars, and cigarettes all release carbon into the atmosphere, rendering them inherently carbon positive. On the bright side, pipes, hookahs, and traditional cigars don’t produce non-biodegradable rubbish, although tobacco packaging may. Regardless, they are all probably a step or two ahead of cigarettes when it comes to sustainability.

If you’re interested in going a little further, you may look into snuff, dip, chewing tobacco, snus, creamy snuff, or gutka, as these forms of “smokeless tobacco” don’t carry the air pollution problems that are inherent to burned tobaccos. Of course, many of them are imported from Europe and Asia, so that’s a consideration.

Final Analysis: In the end, it’s pretty damned hard to use tobacco in a green, sustainable, carbon-negative manner, unless you live in a tobacco-producing region and construct your own smokeless tobacco from locally-available ingredients. That having been said, there are degrees of pollution involved in tobacco consumption, with cigarettes being the worst and organic dip probably being the best. In most cases, however, nicotine absorbtion probably ranges from a F to perhaps a C in terms of sustainability.

[Source] Bruce Watson

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