Smoke-Free Alternatives: Reducing Harm To Health, Environment.

It is undeniable that smoking cigarettes is detrimental for one's health. According to research, it is estimated that tobacco kills 7 million people every year (6 million people die from direct exposure and 1 million people die from secondhand smoke). While most people are aware of the many ways a cigarette harms our body, a lot of them are unaware that its effects on our environment are also quite damaging.

Cigarettes damage our environment by releasing toxic air pollutants into the atmosphere. The smoke released from burning of a cigarette contains thousands of toxic and poisonous chemicals which become part of the air we breathe. Exposure to toxic secondhand smoke and polluted air poses a high risk for non-smokers of suffering from the same complications and diseases that are associated with direct smoking.

Apart from cigarette smoke, cigarette butts also majorly pollute our environment. In fact, they are the world's most littered trash that not only affect the flora and fauna of land but are also the greatest source of ocean trash. Smokers around the world buy roughly 6.5 trillion cigarettes each year. That's 18 billion cigarettes every day. Around two thirds of these cigarette butts are not trashed properly and instead become a part of our environment. The toxic chemicals from the discarded cigarette butts seep into soils and waterways, thereby causing soil and water pollution, respectively. Animals and...