Every year the tobacco industry costs the world more than 8 million human lives, 600 million trees, 200 000 hectares of land, 22 billion tonnes of water and 84 million tonnes of CO2.
The Registrar General of the African Institute of waste management and Environmental Studies, Dr. Ahmed Lateef Tayo has called the Europeans Union (EU) and African Union (AU) to make it mandatory for all tobacco companies across Africa to be paying for the evacuations of all tobacco discarded cigarettes sticks and packs polluting public spaces.
The Registrar makes the call during an interview with journalists including a Team of African Climate Reporters in Kaduna State North-Western Nigeria.
He notes that cigarette butts pose a serious threat to living organisms and ecosystem health when discarded into the environment because they are toxic to microbes, insects, fish, rodents, and mammals.
According to the report, “Tobacco products are the most littered item on the planet, containing over 7000 toxic chemicals, which leech into our environment when discarded and that roughly 4.5 trillion cigarette filters pollute our oceans, rivers, city sidewalks, parks, soil, and beaches every year”.
“It cost a huge amount of money to clean -up all the Millions of cigarette butts in the society capable of destroying the environment and ecosystem”.
Meanwhile, the national president Metro environmental cleaning awareness initiative in Nigeria comrade Suleiman jibrin has called on tobacco companies to find new ways of protecting the environment against the spread of discarded cigarettes butts destroying the good emergence of the environment
He appealed to European nations and African Union equally find new strategies for taxing all the tobacco companies across the world and charges for cleaning up the trash from tobacco waste polluting the environment
Similarly, the Two times winner of world no tobacco Day Mrs. Margaret Julius has called for the banned of all tobacco companies around of world to save youth and women from selling and smoking the cigarettes
She said banning all the tobacco companies from production Is the only solution to the increased burdens of lungs and another health complicated issue
According to the report, Lesotho had the highest presence of tobacco users in Africa as of 2019. That year, 26.7 percent of Lesotho’s population consumed tobacco. Morocco followed close with 23.4, then South Africa with a prevalence of 20.3 percent.
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