BACKGROUND AND IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES: With 4.5 trillion cigarettes discarded per year worldwide, cigarettes are the most littered item on Earth. Millions more cigarette butts end up in waterways where they contaminate water and marine life. And now, the industry’s electronic products are making the problem worse with metals, plastics and batteries contributing to the world’s waste. The tobacco industry not only hides its destruction of the environment while keeping people addicted to tobacco, but it tries to sell itself as a sustainability ally.
INTERVENTION OR RESPONSE: In July 2021, STOP launched Burned by Tobacco (BBT), a campaign shedding light on the industry’s environmental impact. A suite of materials were created, including a webpage, brief, mythbuster, widespread social media campaign, and toolkits in Indonesian, Bengali, Spanish, French, Portuguese and English. In 2022, STOP partnered with the World Health Organization to launch an extension of the campaign focused on microplastics in cigarette filters on World No Tobacco Day. The campaign, Cigarettes = Plastics was also promoted in advance of the UN Plastics Pollution Treaty Negotiations. STOP worked closely with ASH U.S. to deploy geofencing ads that targeted attendees of the treaty negotiations in Uruguay, further amplifying the message within a critical policymaking audience.
RESULTS AND IMPACT: STOP’s BBT and Cigarettes = Plastics materials collectively were seen over 28 million times on social media. These efforts drove over 909,000 pageviews to the STOP website and 10,000 downloads of our materials globally. Media efforts resulted in 110 press mentions, reinforcing the campaign’s prominence in public discourse.
CONCLUSIONS: The Burned by Tobacco campaign successfully highlighted the ecological impact of the tobacco industry and engaged a new audience for STOP through multilingual resources, innovative outreach methods, and strategic partnerships that influenced discussion at the global level.