Greenwashing and pocket ashtrays

In 2021, the Swiss Cigarette association launched the ‘Lara Green’ campaign. This campaign, which appears to have an environmental focus, is in fact nothing more than a greenwashing strategy by the tobacco industry. In this report, we will examine the links between greenwashing and pocket ashtrays.

It is an indisputable fact: the best way to tackle a pollution problem is to tackle it at source. So how can we reduce the 24 million tonnes of solid waste produced each year by the tobacco industry (to cite just this figure)? By reducing the prevalence of smoking.

But the tobacco industry systematically rejects such an approach. Proof of this is its fierce opposition to the initiative ‘Protecting children and young people from tobacco advertising’. Worse still, it operates on the assumption that smoking is a ‘normal’ activity, fully accepted by society, and therefore not open to question. This is why it attempts to implement greenwashing strategies to redeem its image.

The “Lara Green” campaign is a good example of this strategy. Launched in 2021 by the Swiss Cigarette association (comprising the Swiss subsidiaries of British American Tobacco Switzerland, Japan Tobacco International and Philip Morris International), it attempts to give a greener and more eco-friendly image to a polluting industry by offering pocket ashtrays to smokers. But in reality, this is a strategy designed to shift the manufacturer’s responsibility onto smokers and to collect thousands of pieces of data, the intended use of which remains unknown.