One of our followers of our Twitter Account asked us about the carbon footprint of cigarettes. An interesting question that sent us digging through our database and resources to try to answer. Though not a common item to think about when it comes to your carbon footprint, the case of cigarettes is a great example of how all of our choices as individuals contributes to our personal and our collective carbon footprint.

Some who might ask this question may think about the smoke we see rising from the cigarette itself as a non-contributor to the product's carbon footprint - after all tobacco plants, like all other plants, consume carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow. So that means a small portion of that will be sequestered into the soil through the plant's roots while the balance of that CO2 will be released back into the atmosphere at the end of the plant's short life when it is smoked. That would lead us to believe that the smoke itself is just borrowed CO2 being released back into the atmosphere as a part of the fast carbon cycle. Alas, there is not just tobacco in that puff. In the case of cigarettes, the plant's CO2 is joined with a very long list of additional chemical compounds infused into a cigarette...over 4,000 of them in fact. These compounds contribute not only to the health risks of cigarette smoke but also to the carbon footprint of consuming cigarettes as well as the overall environmental impact of the industry.