• Banning cigarettes would result in a much heathier environment.cigarette image by Henryk Olszewski from Fotolia.com
  
  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts "The number of smokers is expected to grow from 1.1 billion in 1998 to around 1.3 billion in 2010." This means that more than 1 billion smokers affect your health, your children's health and the environment. Banning smoking may seem severe, but it would provide multiple benefits.
  
  

Better Health

• The EPA estimates that at least 3,000 nonsmokers die every year of lung cancer caused by secondhand smoke. Children exposed to secondhand smoke have a greater risk of developing asthma, lower respiratory infections, middle ear infections, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Pregnant women exposed to secondhand smoke have an increased chance of delivering low birth-weight babies. The American Cancer Society estimates that annually 46,000 nonsmokers who live with smokers die from heart disease.
  
  If smoking were banned, thousands of lives could be saved, individual health care costs might be reduced, and smoke-induced illnesses would be curbed.
  
  

Reduced Fires

• Cigarettes continue to burn, even when not being smoked. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, nearly 1,000 smokers and nonsmokers a year are killed in home fires caused by cigarettes and other smoking materials. Forrest fires have been started by abandoned cigarettes, and there are numerous other fires that may not have resulted in casualties but were caused by cigarettes. People flick their butts out car windows. These can roll into the dry grass and start a fire. Cigarettes still lit, but deposited in ashtrays can also start fires.
  
  Thousands of homes would be saved every year if smoking were banned. Fires that destroy the environment would be reduced, saving not only the land but animals that live there. Structures that have needlessly gone up in flames because of a lit cigarette would still be standing, and the money used to repair, replace, replant and clean up from these fires could be used elsewhere.
  
  

Cleaner Environment

• Smoking damages the environment. Trees are destroyed to create the cardboard packaging, the smoke pollutes the air and used cigarette butts litter sidewalks and streets. Empty cigarette packs with the cellophane wrappers are non-biodegradable, as are cigarette butts, and the smoke eventually stains things, like walls, fabric and furnishings.
  
  No more smoking would mean less air pollutants and more trees. Shop owners could quit sweeping abandoned cigarette butts and wrappers off their sidewalks. Landfills would not be burdened with all the non-biodegradable garbage cigarettes create.