The plastic in cigarette butts is the catalyst for eliminating all cigarette filters.
Dutch NGO Honest Useful resource Basis launched a worldwide marketing campaign on Could 13, 2025 to ban plastic cigarette filters. ASH is among the many organizations that signed on in assist and collaborated with the Honest Useful resource Basis within the lead as much as the launch.
ASH helps banning all cigarette filters, despite the fact that this explicit marketing campaign solely targets plastic filters. This marketing campaign stays necessary to our work.
First, practically all cigarette filters are manufactured from plastic, 98% of them to be precise. A ban on plastic filters would in observe be a ban on all filters, no less than within the brief time period. The tobacco trade has put critical effort into creating a “biodegradable filter” to exchange plastic filters and failed. If there have been a straightforward various that will keep earnings, the trade would already be utilizing it.
Second, this marketing campaign raises general consciousness of the cigarette filter drawback. Cigarette filters don’t defend customers’ well being and as soon as used, they’re poisonous it doesn’t matter what they’re manufactured from.
The overwhelming majority of individuals assume that filters make cigarettes much less harmful. Who may blame them: It’s proper there within the phrase “filter.” After all, cigarette filters truly make smoking extra dangerous and had been by no means designed to “filter” something. They had been launched within the Nineteen Fifties as a advertising software to placate a public that was changing into more and more alarmed by the well being results of smoking. Primarily, it gave individuals a substitute for quitting, and made it appear to be the trade cared about what occurred to their clients.
Cigarette filters, it doesn’t matter what they’re manufactured from, are a really poisonous byproduct that can’t be recycled and shouldn’t be discarded within the atmosphere resulting from their toxicity. This marketing campaign serves as a platform to tell most people and policymakers in regards to the unfavourable well being impression of cigarette filters and the toxicity of all filters as soon as used.
This marketing campaign doesn’t restrict choice makers to banning solely plastic filters. In all the intense legislative discussions of banning cigarette filters, together with Santa Cruz County’s legislation, all filters have been included, not simply plastic filters.
This marketing campaign seeks to deliver cigarette filters to the legislative docket, which might be a giant win. At the moment, we are able to additional the dialog to level out the apparent reasoning behind banning all cigarette filters.
Plastic is a significant environmental challenge, and the topic of ongoing UN treaty negotiations. When individuals outdoors of the general public well being group hear a couple of plastic filter drawback, they primarily see the phrase “plastic” as a result of, as said above, the phrase “filter” doesn’t elevate any hackles. It brings environmental teams and the environmentally-minded public to the desk. As soon as on the desk, the case for a blanket ban is crucial.
There’s a widespread saying amongst advocates: “Don’t let the proper be the enemy of the nice.” If we insist on an all or nothing method for each initiative, we danger laying aside the day when all filters are banned.
Each step ahead is progress on the street to a tobacco-free world.
