Article Text
Abstract
Cigarette butts and other postconsumer products from tobacco use are the most common waste elements picked up worldwide each year during environmental cleanups. Under the environmental principle of Extended Producer Responsibility, tobacco product manufacturers may be held responsible for collection, transport, processing and safe disposal of tobacco product waste (TPW). Legislation has been applied to other toxic and hazardous postconsumer waste products such as paints, pesticide containers and unused pharmaceuticals, to reduce, prevent and mitigate their environmental impacts. Additional product stewardship (PS) requirements may be necessary for other stakeholders and beneficiaries of tobacco product sales and use, especially suppliers, retailers and consumers, in order to ensure effective TPW reduction. This report describes how a Model Tobacco Waste Act may be adopted by national and subnational jurisdictions to address the environmental impacts of TPW. Such a law will also reduce tobacco use and its health consequences by raising attention to the environmental hazards of TPW, increasing the price of tobacco products, and reducing the number of tobacco product retailers.
- Denormalization
- Environment
- Public policy
- Tobacco industry
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Supplementary materials
Video Abstract
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TWA Visual Summary
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Model Tobacco Waste Act
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Footnotes
Contributors CC and TEN conceived of this article and the Model Tobacco Waste Act (see online supplementary file); CC composed first draft of the submitted article and the initial draft of Model Tobacco Waste Act, and TEN substantially edited the initial article draft and finalised the submitted article. KL provided substantial editing to the draft manuscript and Model Tobacco Waste Act. IMcL and MF contributed to development of the Model Tobacco Waste Act and to editing of the final article submission.
Funding This work was supported by the US National Cancer Institute of the US National Institutes of Health under award No. 2R01CA091021-10A1 and by the University of California Office of the President's Tobacco-related Disease Research Program under award No. 21XT-0030.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement We would like to include our Model Legislation as a online supplementary file.