Sustainability management-ESG

Our at-a-glance guide to BAT features key facts and figures about our business. It
also contains bitesize information around our A Better Tomorrow™ purpose, ESG
ambitions and more.

Our purpose: to build A Better Tomorrow™

We have a clear purpose to build A Better Tomorrow™ by reducing the health

impact of our business.
We aim to have 50m consumers of our non-combustible products by 2030 and to
accelerate the growth of our New Category revenue at a faster rate than our total
revenue, reaching £5bn in 2025. In our 2022 Full-Year Results we announced that
we expect New Category profitability in 2024, one year ahead of plan.

Our ESG targets

30%
Reduce our absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 CO2e emissions**

35%
Reduce the total amount of water withdrawn**

100%
of plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable

Carbon neutrality
across our value chain by 2050

30%
of our direct energy from renewable sources

Find out more about how ESG is front and centre of our business:
bat.com/esgreport
What are the sustainability issues in the tobacco industry?

Every stage of the tobacco supply chain poses serious environmental

consequences, including deforestation, the use of fossil fuels and the dumping or
leaking of waste products into the natural environment.

What is the ESG policy of bat?

Our social priorities

Our ambitions are for zero child labour and zero forced labour in our tobacco
supply chain by 2025. All our product materials suppliers and high-risk indirect
service suppliers will have undergone at least one independent labour audit within
a three-year cycle by 2025.
 Greenwashing, Tobacco Tactics, updated 12 July 2022, accessed 31 January
2024.

Contents
1. Background
2. Environmental impact disclosure
1. Problem of legitimation
2. Problem of voluntary standards
3. Sustainability corporate social responsibility programmes
1. Global tobacco industry-funded programmes
2. Country-level programmes
1. Bangladesh
2. Brazil
3. Canada
4. China
5. India
6. Indonesia
7. Malawi
8. Mexico
9. Mozambique
10. New Zealand
11. Portugal
12. Pakistan
13. Tanzania
14. United Kingdom
15. United States
16. Philippines
3. Tobacco industry charitable donations
4. Co-option of “sustainability”
5. Impact on regulation
6. Tobacco Tactics Resources
7. Relevant Links
8. TCRG Research
9. References
Close

“Greenwashing” refers to the practice used by controversial industries to market their

goods and/or image as environmentally friendly1 in an effort to increase product sales
and divert public attention from their own environmentally damaging
practices.2 Reporting environmental impact and funding environmental corporate
social responsibility (CSR) projects and organisations, serves to “greenwash” tobacco
companies, and detract from the harms the industry inflicts on the environment and
environmental health.

Background
In the summer of 1999, nearly a decade after it was first used by environmental
activists, the term “greenwash” entered the Concise Oxford Dictionary, defined as:
“disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally
responsible public image”.3

The first report on “greenwashing” gave the following examples as illustration: “A

leader in ozone destruction takes credit for being a leader in ozone protection. A giant
oil company professes to take a ‘precautionary approach’ to global warming…
Another giant multinational cuts timber from virgin rainforest, replaces it with
monoculture plantations and calls the project ‘sustainable forest development’”.4

In the decades since, greenwashing has been employed by most polluting or

controversial industries, including oil, chemicals, and nuclear energy.2 The tobacco
industry has historically greenwashed its reputation and products through programmes
such as beach clean-ups,5marketing of new products as “eco-friendly”6 and funding
environmental and disaster-relief organisations,7 especially in low and middle income
countries (LMICs), as the examples below illustrate. As consumers have grown to
care more about corporate environmental performance, and choose more sustainable
products,8 corporations including the tobacco industry have made environmental
sustainability an integral pillar of their corporate social responsibility (CSR)/corporate
social investment (CSI) strategies.

 More information on CSR as a tobacco industry tactic can be found on

our page CSR Strategy.
From the early 2000s, the industry started pushing its CSR and greenwashing
message. For example, in the introduction to British American Tobacco (BAT)’s
“Social Report” in 2002/2003, the company Chairman, Sir Martin Broughton, said
“Corporate social responsibility is integral to our approach to the management of our
businesses globally”.910 Critics were quick to point out the dichotomy and hypocrisy of
this statement. A report by ASH, Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth argued that
“British American Tobacco, while trying hard to convince shareholders and
government otherwise, flies the flag for corporate social irresponsibility”. If nothing
else, the report argued, BAT’s cigarette’s “kill smokers”.11 Since 2009, BAT has
published annual “Sustainability Reports” on its website.12

In an investor presentation in March 2020, BAT executives highlighted the

importance of sustainability and sustainable messaging to consumers. The
presentation detailed how BAT plans to put sustainability “front and centre”,
including the targets of achieving carbon neutrality and 50 million non-combustible
consumers by 2030 (Image 1). Sustainability appears to be a key part of BAT’s 2020
rebranding, which saw the company tagline change to “BAT: A Better Tomorrow”,
accompanied by a new logo and rainbow-themed website. “Sustainability” also
appears as one of the five featured headers on the top menu bar (Image 2).

 For more information on how BAT’s rebranding fits into its broader
product strategy, see our page on Newer Nicotine and Tobacco
Products: British American Tobacco .

Image 1: Three slides relating to sustainability from British American Tobacco’s March
2020 Capital Markets Day.13
Image 2: The re-designed British American Tobacco website. Note that
“Sustainability” appears in the top menu bar (emphasis added).14
Since the 1950s, when the connection between smoking and negative health effects
was first made, tobacco companies have made significant investments in CSR
campaigns. They have also used environmental impact disclosure processes and
sustainability awards from external bodies to try to create a sense of legitimacy and
present their industry as socially and environmentally friendly. However, tobacco
companies have maintained the same harmful framing and production practices.
Tobacco companies save considerable amounts of money by not having to pay the full
cost of the environmental impact of tobacco cultivation, product manufacturing or
cleaning up post-consumer waste. The amount of money companies make while using
harmful practices involved in their supply chain, such as child labour and
deforestation, dwarfs the amount they spend on sustainability CSR projects.15

A 2013 collaborative study between TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and

Biodiversity) for Business, hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme,
and TruCost (the risk assessor arm of S&P Global) found that if major industries were
held financially accountable for their currently unaccounted, environmental impacts,
they would not be profitable.1617

 See our pages on Tobacco and the Environment and Tobacco

Farming for more information on the harms to global and community
environments of tobacco production

In addition to avoiding full financial responsibility for the environmental impact of

their business, tobacco companies are able to enhance their reputations and minimise
harms through existing environmental impact disclosure organisations and practices.
Environmental impact disclosure
Transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) are eager to position themselves as
responsible corporations who care about the environmental sustainability of their
products. Philip Morris International (PMI) and British American Tobacco (BAT),
for example, both state that reducing the environmental impact of their operations is a
key part of their visions for corporate sustainability.518 Company sustainability reports
feature awards and recognitions from organisations such as the Carbon Disclosure
Project and Alliance for Water Stewardship in places of prominence.518719 All of the
‘big four’ TTCs (BAT, PMI, Japan Tobacco International and Imperial Brands)
and Altria have been rated “A”, the highest possible rating, across various indices by
the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a not-for-profit independent index since 2003,
for climate change, water, or forests.1520 Tobacco companies have also been included
in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), which ranks top-performing companies
across industries by sustainability performance.21

Problem of legitimation

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), and other environmental rankings, featured
prominently in the 2018 sustainability reports of each of the ‘big four’ tobacco
companies.185722 Until it was expelled in September 2017, the tobacco industry also
participated in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), a voluntary
sustainability pact to encourage sustainable business practices and reporting.23 In
2016, for the last UNGC at which the tobacco industry was allowed to
participate, Philip Morris International (PMI) authored a brief entitled
“Communication on Progress”. The brief, as Image 3 illustrates, minimized the
amount of water needed to produce tobacco by comparing it with the amounts
necessary to produce tea or chocolate, per weight of finished product.24
Image 3: This infographic authored by Philip Morris International emphasises the
relative size of chocolate, tea and tobacco industries water use.24
As the World Health Organization (WHO) noted, “PMI’s comparison attempts to put
tobacco on par with these other products, ignoring the differentiator that these other
products do not kill one in two of their daily users, as tobacco does”.25 The CDP draws
a similar conclusion in its reports on corporate environmental disclosure: “industries
tend to deemphasise severity of own transgressions and disagree over what constitutes
a ‘significant environmental health’ issue.”26

Participation in the CDP, DJSI, and UN Global Compact (UNGP) may lead to
companies disclosing more environmental information, but it also supports the
legitimisation of the tobacco industry, allowing companies “to be seen more as
‘partners’ in public health and environmental sustainability than their deserved
reputation as sullying both”.17 The public and investors may see inclusion on
sustainability leader boards as endorsements of companies’ environmental
credentials.15

Mandated reporting by governments can limit the opportunity for “trading data for
legitimacy”.17 In Brazil and Canada, for example, tobacco companies are required to
disclose manufacturing practices, product ingredients, toxic constituents and toxic
emissions to national health services. In Brazil, the National Health Surveillance
Agency (ANVISA) has the power to impose fines on companies that are not in
compliance with tobacco control regulations.27

Problem of voluntary standards

Because environmental impact disclosure is generally voluntary, companies can set

their own standards for disclosure. Voluntary disclosure results in environmental
impact data that is vague, unclear and inconsistent in its coverage and
methodologies.17 This creates several problems.

Firstly, there is no industry-wide standardised format that disclosed data must follow.
This makes it difficult for researchers and external evaluators to track progress over
time or make comparisons between companies. Though PMI, BAT and JTI all release
yearly sustainability reports,5187 Imperial Brands and the Altria Group only release
short summaries on their websites and include minimal information on environmental
impact in their annual reports.2228

Secondly, a lack of standards leads to the creation of new units of measurement that
can obscure the true scale of environmental impact. By 2018, for example, tobacco
companies reported environmental impact data in units known as
“intensity”.17“Intensity” refers to units environmental cost per net revenue (e.g. tonnes
of CO2 equivalent emissions per GBP£ million net revenue from smoked and vapour
products).22 By reporting environmental costs in this way, tobacco companies are able
to obscure year-on-year rise in resource consumption as product volume rises.17 For
example, even as the environmental harm per cigarette decreases, the total volume of
cigarettes produced rises, and therefore so does the total environmental impact.

Third, companies are free to set environmental goals to whatever level they like and
choose to disclose on topics that portray their practices in the best light. In 2017, after
BAT-owned leaf suppliers exceeded the company’s global target of 1.5kg chemicals
per hectare , BAT announced it “would no longer have a global average target”.29 It
now discloses no data on the usage of agrochemicals in its leaf cultivation
operations.18 This strategy also applies to external disclosure: BAT, JTI and Imperial
Brands have all opted out of CDP Forestry reporting after receiving “F” ratings on
disclosure and impact in 2017 (BAT,30 JTI31) and 2019 (Imperial32).

Finally, companies are not required to take responsibility for all environmental
impacts associated with the life cycle of their products. Tobacco companies have long
placed the responsibility for the disposal of cigarette butts on the shoulders of
consumers and local government.33 Through the CDP’s Supply Chain Leadership
Collaboration, companies can encourage their suppliers to disclose their
environmental impact data to CDP.34 Tobacco companies have participated in this
programme since 2007.15 PMI, BAT, JTI and Imperial Brands all appear on the CDP
Supplier Engagement Leaderboard,26 a fact which they all promote in their
sustainability reports. However, these same companies do not always account for
“Scope 3” emissions in their sustainability reporting.35 Scope 3 emissions include
“indirect” emissions from independent suppliers in the company’s supply chain,
purchased goods and services and capital goods.17 Tobacco companies can thus
exclude water used by contracted tobacco suppliers, for example, from their total
reported water usages.

Sustainability corporate social

responsibility programmes
Tobacco companies implement a variety of environment/sustainability-
themed corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes across the world in order
to enhance their corporate image. As with disclosure and sustainability awards,
tobacco companies use CSR programmes around sustainability to pre-empt regulation
and influence policymakers.3637 The cases below detail where tobacco companies have
implemented CSR programmes on this topic and the organisations with which they
collaborate in greenwashing efforts.

Global tobacco industry-funded programmes

On both a global and regional level, individual tobacco companies often fund the
same organisations. The Eliminating Child Labour in Tobacco Growing (ECLT)
Foundation was co-founded in 2000 by British American Tobacco (BAT) and its front
group, the International Tobacco Growers’ Association (ITGA) , in response to
criticism over the incorporation of child labour in its leaf supply chain in Malawi and
elsewhere.38 All big four tobacco companies have since joined.39 Until 2019, ECLT
had a long-standing partnership contract with the International Labour Organisation
(ILO). After pressure from tobacco control organisations, ILO allowed the contract to
expire. Both BAT and Imperial Brands are also members of the Slave-Free Alliance
(SFA), which is part of a UK-based charity, Hope for Justice.1840 In its 2018 annual
report, Imperial Brands stated it was a “founding member” of SFA and that SFA,
alongside the ECLT Foundation, received the majority of its charitable contributions. 40
  For more information, visit our page on the ECLT Foundation.

Another industry-founded initiative is the Sustainable Tobacco Programme (STP).

Launched in April 2016, the STP sought to provide a “single sustainability
programme for the tobacco industry”.41 It is managed by independent supply chain
consultant AB Sustain, a subsidiary of AB Agri.42

Total LandCare (TLC) is another sustainability NGO popular with tobacco

companies. Its mission is “to improve the livelihoods and standards of living of
smallholder farm households across the region”.43 Its funders include the Altria Group,
PMI, BAT, Japan Tobacco and the ECLT Foundation as well as non-tobacco
companies like Coca-Cola. TLC began receiving tobacco industry funding in 2001
from PMI and Philip Morris USA (now a member of the Altria Group).43

From 2001 to 2014, BAT, PMI, Japan Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco spent a
combined US$22 million on CSR projects through Total LandCare and ECLT
targeting child labour and deforestation. Researchers calculated that this amount was
roughly equivalent to 2% of the cost savings these companies derived from
deforestation and the use of child labour.15 TLC has since partnered with international
non-governmental organisations, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) and international development agency USAID, as well as
government bodies in southern Africa.43 According to Dr Athena Ramos, public health
disparities researcher at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, CSR programmes
targeted at child labour “represent more of a public relations strategy than any real
meaningful change in practice”.44

These partnerships have at times simultaneously involved the tobacco industry and
governments. From 2009 to 2014, for example, Imperial Tobacco (now Imperial
Brands) funded a TLC project for the Government of Mozambique.45 Specific
examples of the programmes TLC has implemented with tobacco industry funding are
detailed below.

Country-level programmes

Transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) also fund specific country- or community-

level programmes. Below are examples of CSR programmes implemented by TTCs
from countries across the globe, alongside information on in-country tobacco industry
activity.
Bangladesh
In 1980, British American Tobacco Bangladesh’s (BATB) launched the afforestation
project Bonayan, in collaboration with the Ministry of Forest and Environment,
Government of Bangladesh. BATB reported that it had distributed 5 million saplings
in 2019.4647 BATB also runs a project, launched in 2009, entitled Probaho, to provide
safe drinking water.47 In 2021, BATB expanded the project to the remote areas of
Bandarban, launching in the Langi Para area. The Minister for Hill Tracts Bir
Bahadur Ushaising MP inaugurated the local 5,000-liter capacity clean water plant,
alongside a representative from BATB.48

The company has received awards for this work, including from the Prime Minister of
Bangladesh.4950 In 2021, for example, it received award in the Asia Corporate
Excellence and Sustainability Awards,51 and in 2022 another from the Social
Enterprise Research Academy.52 BATB has stated that they plan to continue working
with the government.53

Bangladesh is the 12th largest tobacco producer in the world,54 due, in part, to BAT’s
investments in the 1970s.55 Over 45,000 hectares of land are used for tobacco
cultivation in the country.56 Tobacco farmers are being encouraged to continue to
expand cultivation, thanks to incentives like loans and buy back guarantees from
tobacco companies.54

Tobacco curing uses firewood sourced from local community forests. This leads to
widespread deforestation throughout the world. In Bangladesh, an estimated 170,000
individual trees are logged for this purpose each season, in the districts of Bandarban
and Cox’s Bazar alone.56 In the district of Kushtia, deforestation has meant that local
forests can no longer supply the firewood needed for curing plants. Farmers have to
rely on imported straw and jute instead.57 Tobacco cultivation also leads to water
contamination due to the use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers, as well as soil
contamination and depletion of nutrients. A 2020 study by Hussain et al found that, in
Bangladesh, levels of water and soil contamination were higher for bodies of water
next to tobacco cultivating land.54

Brazil
Souza Cruz, British American Tobacco (BAT)’s Brazilian subsidiary, has partnered
with the National Service of Rural Learning (SENAR) since 1999 to implement the
“Growing Up Right” programme intended to minimise the risk of child labour.18Since
2011, BAT has also been involved with the Brazilian Tobacco Growers Association,
the Brazilian Institute of Environment and the Ministry of the Environment for the
preservation of forest on the south coast of the country.19
In Brazil, where criticism of the soybean industry for its contribution to deforestation
has led to global outcry, tobacco farming ranks alongside soybeans and wheat as one
of the leading causes of vegetation loss.58 In the south of the country, British American
Tobacco’s biggest operational area in the world, tobacco shares responsibility for the
reduction of native forest cover to less than 2% of its original extent.59 During the
same period of escalation of industry forestation CSR programmes, the scale of
destruction of forests actually increased in LMICs during the same period as
escalating CSR promotion, providing an “entrée for the tobacco industry into civil
society and CSR, thus avoiding direct responsibility for the environmental
consequences of the industry” according to Professor Kelley Lee, widely cited
Canadian global health scholar.58

Canada
Unsmoke Canada Cleanups is an initiative which raises awareness of cigarette butt
waste and organises litter clean-ups. Launched in September 2020, this grant-giving
programme operates through a partnership between the national nonprofit The Great
Outdoors Fund60 and Unsmoke Canada, an initiative of Rothmans, Benson & Hedges
Inc., a Philip Morris International subsidiary.6162 KAB has attracted criticism for being
a corporate greenwashing front group.63

China
In 2020, the China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC), donated CNY 40 million
(US$ 6.3 million) to support the development of a water supply system in the Yonghe
County Shanxi Province of China, with a capacity of 5,000 cubic meters of clean
water per day.64.

China produces 40% of the world’s tobacco as well as holding nearly one-third of the
world’s smokers. As the single largest tobacco producer in the world, the China
National Tobacco Corporation produces as many as 2.5 trillion cigarettes per
year.65Tobacco growing and the manufacturing of cigarettes are extremely water-
intensive activities.A 2018 study estimated that the water footprint of a single
cigarette is around 3.7 litres.66 CNTC could be using as much as 9.25 trillion litres of
water for cigarette production.

India
Imperial Brands funds education, sanitation and health through its leaf partnership
with Alliance One in the Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, including environmental
education through PROTECT, a local NGO, and an after-school programme, which
Imperial said was intended to “minimize the risk of child labour”.67
Individual interventions on a community level do not address the structural,
ecological and financial harms that tobacco cultivation causes to local communities.
In India, where tobacco cultivation causes the loss of 45 kg of topsoil per acre
cultivated per year, a government report called mono-cropped tobacco “the most
erosive crop”, beating out cotton (7.5 kg), grapes (11 kg) and groundnut (12.5)
(Reddy & Gupta, 2001).68 Child labour in the tobacco industry has also been
documented in Andhra Pradesh as well as across the country.69 According to Dr
Ramos, tobacco industry CSR programmes that propose to address child labour
“represent more of a public relations strategy than any real meaningful change in
practice” and disincentivise external monitoring efforts, especially in LMICs.44

Indonesia
Sampoerna, PMI’s Indonesian subsidiary, operates a wide number of
environmentally-focussed CSR programmes under its “Sampoerna untuk Indonesia”
scheme. These include a two-year (2018-2020) production sludge waste to fertiliser
research project with Insitut Peranian Bogor (IPB) and Indonesian Agricultural
Department in East Java (BPTP). A second major programme is the “Hope Project”,
which re-purposes factory materials like pallets for its “adult consumer events” and
forms a key part of Sampoerna’s marketing strategy. The company stated that: “In
2018, this project successfully recycled 52 tons worth of materials while
simultaneously reducing 20% in marketing costs”.70 Sampoerna has won national and
international awards for these programmes, such as the Green Company Performance
Rating Program from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry in 2022,71, a Global
CSR Award and a Global Good Governance Award in 2021.72

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that in the course of a 2014-2015 study on
child labour in Indonesian tobacco fields, nearly half of all children interviewed
reported symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning. HRW concluded that
“companies’ human rights due diligence practices were not sufficient to eliminate
hazardous child labor in the supply chain” and therefore tobacco companies “risk
contributing to the use of, and benefitting from, hazardous child labor”.73 Both BAT
and PMI have major operations in this area: PT Bentoel Internasional Investama
(Bentoel) and PT Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna Tbk (Sampoerna), respectively.74

Malawi
From 2001 to at least 2013, Total LandCare (TLC) received millions of dollars of
funding from the tobacco industry and ECLT Foundation for forestry,7576 crop
diversification7778 and child labour7980 projects in Malawi.
Malawi and Mozambique are “strategic leaf sourcing locations” for Imperial Brands
in Africa. In Malawi, Imperial has been piloted many sustainability initiatives across
areas including water conservation,408182 afforestation,83 combatting soil erosion,84 and
crop diversification.85

In 2018, PMI signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Palladium, the in-country

implementer of USAID’s Feed the Future Malawi Agricultural Diversification
project,86 to implement “select initiatives” in Malawi.5 It is unclear whether this
partnership includes funding. Palladium is also funded by the Foundation for a
Smoke-Free World, a foundation funded solely by PMI. Read more on our page on
the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World Grantees .

Tobacco industry harms to the environment and to smallholder farmer communities

are well-documented in Malawi. Estimates have placed responsibility for 70% of
national deforestation in Malawi on the shoulders of the tobacco industry, making it
the main cause of deforestation in the country.87 In 2015, Malawi devoted 5% of its
agricultural land to farming tobacco, the highest proportion in the world, but also had
the fourth fastest deforestation rate in the world.88 BAT is also being sued by the
British legal firm, Leigh Day, for deriving “unjust enrichment” from underpayment
and forced/child labour in tobacco farming operations in Malawi. Although BAT and
Imperial Brands are named on the lawsuit filed on behalf of tenant farmers in Malawi,
this case could protect children and serve as legal precedent to force tobacco supply
chain reform, according to Margaret Wurth, a senior researcher at Human Rights
Watch.8990

Mexico
Philip Morris International (PMI) runs an initiative in Mexico which involves
collecting lighters and other litter to prevent fires. It also helps to promote “smoke-
free” messaging and its heated tobacco product, IQOS . Participants collect used
lighters and take them to PMI stores and other “strategic points.”91

Mozambique
From 2009 to 2014, TLC was one of a several organisations implementing the
government initiative “Promoting Rural Investment in Smallholder Enterprises”
(PRISE) in Mozambique. This project was majority funded by Imperial Tobacco (now
Imperial Brands).45

Food insecurity has been tied to tobacco cultivation in Mozambique. In 2019, the
Global Hunger Index rated the situation in Mozambique as “serious”: 27.9% of the
population was undernourished. Tobacco farming takes arable land away from food
crops, depletes soil nutrients and contaminates local water supplies, further harming
staple crop production. This in turn further diminishes food security and contributes to
malnutrition in communities.9293

New Zealand
British American Tobacco New Zealand (BATNZ) provides funding to Keep New
Zealand Beautiful for its anti-littering education programmes.18

More than six million cigarette butts are discarded in the environment in New Zealand
each year. Researchers have called initiatives that encourage individual-level
interventions to address tobacco product waste largely ineffective: “Fundamentally,
these ’corporate social responsibility’ initiatives position butt disposal as a smokers’
problem, reinforce negative stereotypes of smokers, and relocating responsibility
away from tobacco companies”.94

Portugal
PMI has funded ABAE’s “#Breakthehabit” anti-littering education campaign since
2018 in Portugal.5 PMI is not, however, listed as a partner on the organisation’s
website.95 Beach clean-up initiatives sponsored by tobacco industry in the United
States, for example, have attracted criticism for contributing to greenwashing.63

Cigarette filters are commonly the most collected item on beach clean-ups.
Worldwide, an estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are deposited each year. 96 The
industry has consistently and disingenuously marketed cigarette filters as
“biodegradable”, with the explicit aim of pre-empting environmental legislation. 97

Pakistan
In 2021, BAT subsidiary Pakistan Tobacco Company (PTC) donated 500,000 seed
balls to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Forest Department for the governmental
afforestation project “Ten Billion Trees”.98 In 2022, PTC ran a project comprising free
distribution of saplings of indigenous species.99 The company received awards for
these initiatives, including for Clean Energy Transition, Responsible Investment,
Community Impact and Environment –Carbon footprint reduction.100

To produce cigarettes, raw tobacco is cured using wood for fuel. Farmers either obtain
this wood from the market, or by cutting down local and indigenous trees. One study
observed 4,500 tobacco-curing kilns in just one tobacco-growing village, servicing
around 11,000 acres of land under tobacco cultivation. Combined, these kilns burn
about 6,300 tons of fuel wood each curing cycle.101 In 2020, around 125,500 acres
(50,800 hectares) of land in Pakistan was devoted to tobacco growing.102
For World Cleanup Day 2022, Philip Morris (Pakistan) Limited (PMPKL) launched a
litter clean-up project titled #MissionCleanerPakistan, including a litter pick on
Clifton Beach, Sea View, Karachi, volunteers collected over 3300 kilograms (3.3
tonnes) of trash for this project.103 PMPKL has won awards for its CSR activities in
Pakistan, including in “Employee Volunteerism” and “Waste
Management/Recycling”104 and “Green Energy Initiatives”.103105

After the Sri Lankan government publicly announced its intention to ban tobacco
cultivation by 2020, Ceylon Tobacco Company (CTC) engaged in spreading
misleading information about the contribution of tobacco cultivation to sustainable
development, attempted to interfere in the policymaking process, organised a
Buddhist ritual against the ban and promoted its SADP programme through media
tours.106

Tanzania
The JT Group (JTI parent company) partnered with TLC from 2007 to 2014 to fund
the Community Reforestation and Support Program in Tanzania and Malawi.107

Loss of biodiversity due to tobacco cultivation deforestation-driven habitat

fragmentation is well-documented in Tanzania. Excessive wood use during tobacco
curing and uncontrolled land clearing are important factors leading to deforestation
and desertification. The tobacco industry has a history of funding and promoting
afforestation programmes in order to distract and refute research that shows the
negative effects of tobacco cultivation on forest cover, biodiversity, soil erosion and
ground water retention.108

United Kingdom
In January 2021, Philip Morris Limited entered a multi-year agreement with the non-
for-profit, Clean Up Britain (CLUB) to “tackle cigarette butt litter”. Within this
voluntary agreement, CLUB acts as independent administrator for a PMI-funded
project. 109 PMI reportedly paid a “seven-figure sum” to fund the project, which
consists in applying “emotional” pressure on smokers caught littering cigarette
ends.110 The campaign was launched in January 2022 in Bristol, under the title “Get
Your Butt Off Our Streets”, to be later rolled out across Britain.111 An estimated 4.5
trillion cigarette butts are discarded every years in the environment, making them the
most littered item on Earth.96 Post-consumer waste, largely in the form of discarded
cigarette butts, and its disposal, is however only the last step of life-cycle of a
cigarette. Each step of the tobacco supply chain, from agriculture to distribution,
contributes substantially to climate change and environmental degradation.
United States
Altria, Reynolds American International (BAT) and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco
Company (BAT) all provide funding for the Cigarette Litter Prevention Programme
run by Keep America Beautiful (KAB).112. The Cumberland Plateau Stewardship
Fund, of which Altria is a member along with US government departments, has
provided a total of US$3.1 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to
fund conservation programmes in the US Cumberland Plateau, which spans parts of
eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, from 2017-2019.113114115 RAI and
Altria are also both members of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative hosted at
North Carolina State University (NC State).1828 The Cumberland Plateau is located in
key tobacco growing states. A 2013 investigation by Human Rights Watch revealed
that, of 133 children interviewed in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and
Virginia, where over 90% of tobacco grown in the US is cultivated, 66% reported
symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning. At least eight major cigarette
manufacturers, including BAT, PMI, Altria, Imperial Brands, JTI and China National
Tobacco Company all sourced tobacco leaf from the US at the time.116

Philippines
In 2019, PMFTC, the Philippine affiliate of PMI, donated 30 waste bins to the Armed
forces at camp Servillano Aquino, Tarclac City.Tobacco accounts for 2 million tons
of solid waste worldwide, every year.96

Tobacco industry charitable donations

Charitable donations are a key part of tobacco industry CSR strategy Though
companies are not always obliged to disclose the amounts and destinations of their
charitable donations, both Philip Morris International and the Altria Group publish
information on their funding of third-party organisations online.117118

The tobacco industry also commonly donates to disaster relief efforts where they
operate, including: Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti,117 Indonesia,7119117 Italy, Japan,
Malaysia,117 Mexico,7117 Mozambique,120 the Philippines,7117 Romania, Senegal and
Serbia.117

These lists are not comprehensive. Evidence of funding for sustainability programmes
in Australia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Japan, South Africa, South
Korea and Ukraine is also given in PMI’s charitable donations disclosure for 2014-
2018.117
In the United States, the Altria Group has funded various environmental sustainability
organisations. Donations disclosed in 2018 and 2019 appear in the table below.

Table 1. Altria Group charitable donations to environmental/sustainability

organisations in 2018 and 2019.118
*Total giving US$5.6 million in “Environment” category.
**
Amount not disclosed.
Co-option of “sustainability”
In sustainability reports, tobacco companies use “sustainability” as a rhetorical
strategy to align themselves with both environmental sustainability and sustainable
development. All major TTCs are at least rhetorically supportive of the UN
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); examples from 2018 and 2019 tobacco
company sustainability reports can be seen in Image 4.

Image 4: Tobacco companies use sustainability reports to attempt to align

themselves with Sustainable Development Goals.522121122
For example, in the company’s 2016 sustainability report, BAT CEO (at the time)
Nicandro Durante said there was a “clear alignment between the SDGs and our own
sustainability priorities”.29 However, since 2017, WHO’s Framework Convention on
Tobacco Control, which prevents the tobacco industry from having influence on
health policy, has been explicitly included in SDG 3 (Human Health) through Target
3A: “Strengthen the implementation of the World Health Organization Framework
Convention on Tobacco Control in all countries, as appropriate”.123 Notably, none of
these reports mention the incorporation of the WHO FCTC into the SDGs as part of
Target 3.

In Highjacking the SDGs? The Private Sector and the Sustainable Development
Goals, German tobacco control expert Laura Graen argued that references to the
SDGs form “part of a broader, multi-layered strategy with the aim of stopping tobacco
control measures such as taxation, advertising bans or plain packaging”.23An
internal Philip Morris International (PMI) document, leaked to Reuters in 2017,
revealed that the potential inclusion of additional tobacco control measures in the
SDGs were seen by PMI as an “alarming development” because the company feared
“that it could lead to the creation of another international body at the UN that would
deal specifically with tobacco issues”.124

Tobacco companies take advantage of conflicting goals (e.g. economy and health)
within SDGs. In particular, tobacco companies point to SDG 17 (on Public-Private
Engagement) to justify and advocate for tobacco industry involvement in government,
which is prohibited by Article 5.3 of the FCTC.185227 The industry has formed
relationships with other government departments after being excluded from health
through “sustainable development” partnerships and programmes: BAT Bangladesh
has partnered with the Bangladeshi Department for Agricultural Extension to
implement sustainability CSR projects.125 The industry uses SDGs to further
circumvent regulation and perpetuate its harmful business practices, undermining
sustainable development rather than helping it.23

 For more detail on how the tobacco industry aligns itself with
sustainable development in smallholder farmer communities, read our
page on Tobacco Farming.

Impact on regulation
On one hand, encouraging companies to disclose more information on the
environmental impact of their products (through their life cycle and supply chains)
can be seen as increasing transparency and supporting improvement of inefficient and
harmful practices. On the other hand, increasing disclosure can also be seen as a form
of CSR self-promotion. Academic research on governance suggests that these
“proactive moves by the industry to stave off regulation that would require them to
adhere to externally wrought environmental standards and practices”.126

Voluntary disclosure and other “ethical and green business” practices have been
criticised as CSR and public relations campaigns designed to rehabilitate corporate
image and increase product sales without addressing the fundamental changes
necessary to core business practices.15127128 An additional challenge is that regulations
differ by location. Tobacco companies have also historically taken advantage of
differing regulation to avoid bearing the weight of corporate responsibility for their
products. This includes avoiding and evading tax as well as environmental
regulations.129130
For example, in March 2016, BAT announced it would close a cigarette
manufacturing plant in Malaysia due to the government’s implementation of an
increased excise tax and consideration of plain packaging.131 However, it had really
made plans to open up another manufacturing plant in southern Vietnam, well before
the excise taxes or discussions on plain packaging commenced.132

The tactic of moving production facilities has been used by tobacco companies around
the world, often when governments have sought to introduce tobacco control
regulations. For example, when faced with the prospect of increased taxes and
government’ support for tobacco control, Philip Morris International has closed, or
threatened to close, manufacturing plants in Argentina.133134 and Colombia.135BAT used
the same tactic in Chile in 2015.136

Industry-funded sustainability programmes pre-empt criticism and make it difficult to

advocate for external regulation. When commenting on the efficacy and intent of
tobacco industry reforestation schemes, prominent tobacco control researchers Dr
Marty Otañez and Dr Stanton Glantz said that industry-funded programmes facilitate
an environment where government officials LMICs who lack revenues to fund their
own initiatives are hesitant to criticise tobacco industry schemes or refuse funding.
Additionally, “association with social and environmental responsibility may weaken
opposition from public health and civil society groups to industry interference in
tobacco control policy by making it politically more difficult to criticize tobacco
companies”.15

The tobacco industry has also moved to distance itself from tobacco cultivation
through establishing “leaf partnerships” with third-party companies. Instead of direct
contracts with farmers, this has had the effect of transferring responsibility for
monitoring and addressing problems from tobacco companies to leaf companies,
while continuing to reap the benefits of cheap leaf products and escaping culpability
for harmful practices. Especially in LMICs, where there may be less infrastructure to
support monitoring and corporate financial contributions may have a greater impact,
tobacco companies can use these kinds of initiatives to increase political support and
weaken opposition.44

The WHO’s 2017 report on the environmental harms of tobacco says that this practice
of evading tax and regulation “epitomizes how, in many instances, when citizens
petition for better environmental practices or more socially responsible business
conduct, transnational tobacco companies simply uproot their operations and ignore
the long-term environmental damage that they have caused, and take them to a new
location where they can repeat the environmental damage”.87 When companies
relocate away from taxation and regulation, they impoverish already cash-strapped
central governments. The current and historical tax evasion and anti-tax lobbying of
tobacco companies makes it all the more difficult for LMICs with developing
economies to devise and implement effective environmental regulatory regimes.

It its 2017 report, WHO recommended that steps to limit greenwashing include
legislating at international and local levels to require companies meet specific
disclosure requirements for material emissions, water usage, waste disposal, chemical
use, child labour and other targets. It is particularly important that these regulations
apply equally across countries; tobacco companies have a history of moving their
operations to avoid scrutiny and environmental regulations.87 The evaluation of
disclosed data should be performed by independent evaluators, such as government,
who do not require or accept payment from companies for this service.17 The WHO
also recommends that countries ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship
(TAPS) that include bans on advertising CSR programmes, in accordance with the
FCTC.

Researchers and international non-governmental organisations, including the

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European
Union (EU), have suggested that implementing and strengthening existing Extended
Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes to make producers responsible for the
physical and financial costs of disposing of waste of post-consumer products.137138EPR
will be implemented in the EU, with increasing targets for recycling, prevention and
use from 2025 to 2035.139 The “Single Use Plastics Directive” will include cellulose
acetate products, including cigarette filters, which do not biodegrade.33