By Timothy S. Donahue
Top Takeaways:
- Regulation first: Greenbutts co-founder Tadas Lisauskas said that environmental regulation, more than consumer demand, will force investment in biodegradable materials and other alternatives.
- Farm-level challenge: Pyxus’ Miranda Kinney said climate programs must be economically viable for farmers, particularly in cases where changes require upfront investment and returns take years.
- Whole-life thinking: Panelists argued that nicotine companies need to address products from farming and manufacturing through repair, reuse, collection, and disposal.
Climate policy is increasingly a product-design problem for the nicotine industry.
Executives and sustainability specialists at the Global Tobacco & Nicotine Forum (GTNF) said the industry’s response to climate change will increasingly depend on what happens both long before a product reaches the consumer and long after the consumer is finished with it.
The “Innovative Responses to Climate Change & Global Climate Policy” panel brought together leaf suppliers, manufacturers, researchers and materials developers to discuss topics ranging from deforestation and farmer financing to cigarette filters, lithium batteries and product repair.
Ben Dessart, vice president of external affairs at Universal Corp., stepped in to moderate the discussion, which included Miranda Kinney, senior vice president and global head of corporate affairs and impact at Pyxus International; Aylèn Van Isseldyk, founder and director of THR, Ethics and Sustainability; Greenbutts President and co-founder Tadas Lisauskas; and Philip Morris International’s Nicole Austin, who joined virtually.
One theme emerged repeatedly: sustainability programs do not work simply because companies or governments say they should. For Kinney, that starts at the farm.
“You have to protect that opportunity,” she said of cooperation between industry and government. “The ability to have industry and government speak together is critical for any kind of solution.”
Kinney said climate programs have to reach throughout the entire supply chain, beginning with farmers rather than being imposed from the factory level down. “When you’re starting with the farmer and getting them to be on board with whatever changes are being made, the more successful you’re going to be,” she said.
That becomes especially important in tobacco-growing regions, where curing can depend heavily on wood fuel.
Kinney pointed to Africa, where unsustainably sourced curing wood can contribute to deforestation. The lesson, she said, is that growers must understand how a sustainability requirement benefits their own businesses rather than simply being handed another compliance obligation. “It’s helping them understand the benefit to them, and why this matters to their business, their long-term viability, their market access,” Kinney said.
Pyxus has made climate mitigation, sustainable land use, and farmer well-being integral to its broader sustainability strategy, including programs to secure sustainable wood supplies and reduce deforestation in tobacco-growing regions.
Regulation creates the market
Lisauskas took a more direct view of the drivers of environmental innovation. Asked whether emerging plastics rules are creating genuine demand for better materials or merely adding compliance costs, he said the answer begins with compliance. “I think honestly, it’s compliance first, and demand probably a distant second,” Lisauskas said.
Greenbutts develops biodegradable materials for cigarettes and other nicotine products, including an alternative to conventional cellulose acetate cigarette filters. The company says its plant-based filter material is designed to work with existing filter-making equipment and to break down much more quickly than acetate filters.
Lisauskas argued that consumer demand alone is unlikely to generate sufficient scale to justify the investment required to replace established materials. “Without the compliance aspect, especially in this industry, I think the consumer is not really going to demand anything,” he said.
That problem becomes more pronounced when a new material has to compete economically with a product manufactured in the trillions. “We’re literally trying to compete with a 70-year-old product, with trillions of units, and make it at the same price,” Lisauskas said. “It’s impossible to predict. It’s impossible to make that math work without the input of the industry.”
For him, regulatory certainty matters as much as regulation does. “Until there’s a date certain that they say from this point on it’s not going to be on the market, that’s the only way that they’re going to get innovation,” he said. “Nobody is going to put the budget towards scaling without a certain date.”
His criticism also extended to how regulators treat cigarette filters. Lisauskas noted that conventional filters are made of cellulose acetate plastic, a fact many consumers do not realize. “Most consumers think it’s either paper or cotton, not plastic,” he said.
He argued that responsibility cannot simply be shifted to smokers and other nicotine consumers by telling them to dispose of products properly. “We’ll produce this product. It’s plastic. We’re not going to really tell you that it’s plastic, but you should throw it out responsibly,” Lisauskas said. “I think that’s ridiculous.”
Make sustainability easy
PMI’s Austin said sustainability also has to be embedded in ordinary business decisions rather than treated as a separate corporate program.
At PMI, she said, sustainability is integrated into corporate governance, including an index tied to executive compensation. The company’s sustainability metrics account for 30% of its performance-based long-term equity awards, a structure PMI says is designed to align management accountability with long-term strategic goals.
“The biggest challenge is ensuring that on a regular basis, in every business decision and in every business function and market, that they are considering sustainability,” Austin said.
She said there are also straightforward business reasons to do so, including anticipating regulation, managing climate-related supply-chain risks, and improving operational efficiency. “Reacting is much more expensive. It’s much more time-consuming and stressful than anticipating that regulation,” Austin said.
The same thinking applies at the consumer end of the product’s life cycle. Austin said manufacturers cannot assume that consumers will participate in recycling, repair, or collection programs simply because those programs exist.
She gave an example from PMI’s device-repair program. Shipping a device for centralized repair could leave a consumer without it for an extended period, creating a clear disincentive. PMI has instead been working to make repairs available in stores so consumers can have devices fixed while buying consumables. “You need to design programs that are easy for consumers,” Austin said. “It’s not that they don’t want to.”
The goal, she said, is to make extending a device’s life convenient enough that consumers will actually do it. That issue is becoming increasingly important as the nicotine market shifts beyond cigarettes toward products that contain plastics, electronics and lithium-ion batteries.
Van Isseldyk argued that tobacco harm reduction and environmental responsibility should not be treated as competing objectives. Lower-risk nicotine products may reduce exposure to combustion, she said, but they still create an environmental footprint that must be addressed through product design, collection systems and circular-economy programs.
Her central argument was that reducing harm to consumers should not simply transfer a different kind of harm to soil, water, or future generations. That left the panel with a broader challenge.
Climate policy is no longer only about emissions at the factory or about trees planted elsewhere to offset them. For nicotine companies, it increasingly extends to how tobacco is grown, how products are built, what materials they contain, and what happens when the consumer is finished with them.
As Lisauskas put it, encouragement by itself probably will not be enough. “No innovation happens on encouragement,” he said. “It happens when it’s either regulated or demanded by the public.”
