APPG on Smoking and Health meets to take action on cigarette filter ‘litter and lies’
Yesterday members of the APPG on Smoking and Health and other Parliamentarians gathered to discuss the harms caused by cigarette filters. The event, named ‘Litter & Lies: Ending the Filter Fraud & Protecting our Planet’, allowed for engaging conversations about both the public health harms and environmental damage caused by cigarette filters.
Cigarette filters are the most littered item on the planet and 3 million are littered every day in the UK. Parliamentarians heard from ecologist Dr Bas Boots from Anglia Ruskin University. Dr Boots explained his research that shows that cigarette filters are harmful no matter what they are made of, leaching over 1,000 toxic chemicals into our waterways and affecting sea life and animals. He spoke of the issues caused by microplastics but also that so called ‘biodegradable filters’ are not a policy solution from an environmental perspective.
Parliamentarians then heard from Dr Katie East, from Kings College London, who addressed the health harms that have arisen from the introduction of cigarette filters. Dr East told attendees that a new paper, that had been published that morning highlighting data from Action on Smoking and Health, shows that only 25% of the public can correctly identify that filters don’t provide any health protection to smokers. She explained that cigarette filters encourage smokers to inhale more deeply, causing further harm and that some filters have been directly linked to marked increased cases of lung adenocarcinoma.
Parliamentarians viewed historic advertisements that use cigarette filters as a marketing tool, giving the impression that filtered cigarettes were safer or reduced tar.
These posters, from the 50s and 80s, contained claims like ‘the thinking man’ chooses a certain tobacco brand and that if your lips don’t touch a filter you have further protection.
Attendees were also able to play a game of ‘guess how many littered cigarette filters are in the jar’. The answer was 2,000, which shockingly is the number of cigarettes littered every minute in the UK.
The APPG agreed several actions to raise this issue within Parliament as the Tobacco and Vapes Bill makes its way through the House of Lords. They encouraged attendees to support Baroness Natalie Bennett’s amendment on this issue which would require the Government to ban all filters, not just those made from plastic.
