If you’ve been to a festival in Cape Town or visited a tobacconist recently, you might have come across a distinct brown and green cigarette box – Woodland Craft Cigarettes by Smokey Treats.
What makes them different, exactly? While they recognize smoking cigarettes is a horrible habit, there are ways to decrease your impact on the environment with eco-friendly changes to the cigarette and packaging.
How many times have you squashed a cigarette under your shoe at a beautiful festival ground, in the street or at your local bar?
While it seems just one butt isn’t really a problem, cigarette filters are made from plastic (acetate) which like other plastic products, take forever to properly breakdown.
They end up going down the drain, or staying on festival grounds, which ultimately impact our beautiful land and oceans!
Here’s a fun fact too: almost 7 trillion cigarettes are smoked worldwide every year. Do you think even half of those land up in an ashtray as they should? Certainly not!
Not only that, there’s a ton of artificial additives in a typical cigarette. These chemical additives increase their toxicity. Smoking itself is inherently bad enough for you. Plus, regular papers are bleached with chlorine, too!
How does Smokey Treats aim to solve this problem?
Woodland Craft Cigarettes do things a bit differently. The filter is made up of biodegradable wood-pulp, which over time will completely disintegrate.
There are no additives in the locally (African) sourced tobacco. There’s no bleach in the paper, no plastic in the packaging (it’s actually recycled cardboard) and no synthetic inks.
The ultimate question to any cigarette smoker – does it take like a normal cigarette, especially the brand that I personally smoke?
Probably not. While all cigarettes at their core essentially are a huff of smoke in your lungs, every smoker has an acquired brand they find most desirable.
Are there other alternatives?
While Woodland Craft Cigarette is the only full eco-friendly cigarette, a number of organic roll-your-own tobaccos and accessories (like filter tips and papers) have become available on the market. A few people have also shifted towards vapes and CBD vapes.
