New Cigarette Pack Regulations to Cut Down 30 Wembley Stadiums’ Worth of Trees – Guido Fawkes

New Cigarette Pack Regulations to Cut Down 30 Wembley Stadiums’ Worth of Trees

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The government has been making a fuss about its environmental credentials along with its tobacco policy – proudly announcing the ban on disposable vapes from June 2025. Just last week, Labour environment minister Mary Creagh cited the ban as helping tackle the “huge and growing” amount of hard-to-recycle waste to drive forward the government’s climate agenda. Green goodness…

That might be a convincing argument – if the government wasn’t simultaneously pushing a consultation to mandate ‘slide and shell’ inserts in all cigarette packs with quit information messages and smoking health-risk warnings, a change already forced through in Canada. These extra warning inserts would require a whopping 40% increase in cigarette packaging materials. Hardly an eco-friendly decision…

Guido has done the maths. Forcing this change on all cigarette packs will use paper equivalent to 1.5 billion A4 sheets every year, generating nearly seven million kilograms of CO2. That’s the same as chopping down 150,800 trees annually – or wiping out a forest 30 times the size of Wembley Stadium. If this is Labour’s idea of a green agenda, someone needs to check the colour balance…