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Italiano Puffing up profits
Why the Colossi will never reveal their recipes.
Dick Cavett, performer, comedian and talk show host of America's popular Dick Cavett Show
The disclosure of cigarette ingredients is not a simple matter for Big Tobacco, starting from the tobacco itself. According to the World Health Organization, thanks to the introduction of new technologies, additives, reconstituted tobacco and other materials, the tobacco leaf content in cigarettes has gone from 2.28 lbs per 1000 cigarettes in 1960, to 0.91 lbs in 2000. Marvels of science!
As the use of tobacco increases around the world, people would expect cigarette manufacturers to buy more and more tobacco leaves.
But thanks to new technologies, that allow them to artificially increase the volume of the tobacco leaves, these companies can now use less and less tobacco in their cigarettes. Yet there is no shortage of tobacco in the world.
Moreover, today science enables manufacturers to transform all sorts of waste that they find on the floor of their factories into cigarette filling! (that has the taste of natural tobacco and looks just like real tobacco to people who are not experts.
“As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it”. Why should this statement of Dick Cavett not be applicable also to cigarettes?
Waste by the Cubic meter
One of the most common processes for expanding tobacco is the Dry Ice Expanded Tobacco Process (DIET), which was developed in a joint venture of Philip Morris in 1979. It involves putting tobacco leaves in a bath of liquid carbon dioxide, which solidifies at atmospheric pressure. Boiling gas is pumped into the mix heating the tobacco and evaporating the dry ice; this process expands the tobacco.
“If you ship us waste, wèll give you back a bigger portion of waste”, declared Phil Green, plant manager at BAT in Corby, Great Britain, where the DIET process is used.
In the past tobacco expansion was obtained also with chloro fluorocarbons (CFCs), until their use was forbidden because of their harmful effects on earth's Ozone layers.
Other companies have invented other methods: the German producer Reetsma uses nitrogen in a process called INCOM, while the British producer Imperial uses isopretane instead of carbon dioxide in a process called IMPEX. All these methods provide material expansion from 60 to 100%.
Expanded tobacco offers many benefits to manufacturers. The possibility to fill cigarettes with less tobacco means higher profits and lower taxes, because most countries tax imported tobacco based on its weight.
These lighter-weight cigarettes also lower the tar and nicotine data that show up in testing of the measuring machine, they burn faster and deliver the tobacco quicker, declared Phil Green of BAT.
Waste not, want not
For more than 50 years, scientists of the major multinational tobacco producers have carried on research basing their work on the old saying “waste not, want not”. Hence the use of reconstituted tobacco, available as slurry or paper, that is made with reject and waste materials obtained during the tobacco treatment, like stems, small tobacco particles and tobacco dust.
reconstituted tobacco is made with reject and waste materials
The reason why these tobacco bits have to be reworked rather than being included directly in the cigarette is because they are not palatable for the smoker in their raw form. The stems, for example, were always considered an unusable part of the tobacco plant, as they produce smoke with a bitter taste and they are difficult to treat.
In this shameful process, glues are added to these raw materials.
“Paper” tobacco
But the most popular form of reconstituted tobacco is “paper tobacco”, that includes 70% of the market and is gradually replacing the slugging process. This is made following the same process used in making paper. Water-soluble elements are taken out of the raw material until only fibers are left; these are shaped into sheets, and then the soluble material is put back in.
reconstituted tobacco is made following the same process used in making paper
Nicolas Baskevitch, research director for Schweitzer Mauduit International (a company in Atlanta that supplies the major international cigarette makers with cigarette paper) declared that the tobacco industry manufactures up to 240 million tons per year of reconstituted tobacco made with this paper process.
This is an important part of the taste of the cigarette, that the smoker desires after getting used to the brand, especially in the case of American Blend cigarettes.
The use of reconstituted tobacco authorizes cigarette manufacturers to put additives into the final product. Jerome Rivers, a former Philip Morris employee, in a 1996 affidavit, affirmed “One of the ingredients regularly added to the slurry at the BL plant [Philip Morris's blended leaf factory in Richmond, Virginia] was ammonia. Other ingredients included alcohol-based flavors, sugars, urea, and glycerin”.
reconstituted tobacco and ammonia technology
A recent new method for producing reconstituted tobacco is to add tobacco materials directly to an ammonium solution. The resulting slurry is steam pressurized for up to five minutes and then rapidly depressurized to be made into a second slurry, which is then cast into a reconstituted tobacco sheet.
These reconstituted tobacco sheets (which do not resemble tobacco leaf) are then subjected to an expansion process. The sheets are “puffed up” until they look like particleboard and subsequently fed into giant mills, which shave them into the little golden curls which look almost exactly like natural cured tobacco leaf. These and other methods have allowed manufacturers to considerably reduce the amount of real tobacco leaf they use in their cigarettes.
The Food and Drug Administration
It is to be hoped that decisive government action will oblige Big Tobacco to publish their tobacco recipes, but even before they publish them, they should change the ingredients and the way they make their cigarettes.
Big Tobacco's Last Battle, the one involving an improbable 280 billion dollars, should give the Food and Drug Administration the power it needs to ensure that the law is respected. Wèll see!
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