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Asked by jaume-pla@stpauls.es to Anais, katy, Lauren, Richard, Stuart on 10 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by Aaronsito toty.
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Lauren Laing answered on 10 Mar 2016:
Great question! I agree it is not nice at all, although cigarettes don’t actually contain tar, not the sort we use on the roads anyway. Cigarette tar is a term adopted to describe the toxic chemical particles left behind from burning cigarettes, which forms a tacky brown or yellow residue.
Cigarette tar is poisonous and carcinogenic and is present wherever there is tobacco smoke. There are many chemicals in cigarettes which make up this tar, over 4000 chemical compounds are created by burning a cigarette – 69 of those chemicals are known to cause cancer.
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Stuart Atkinson answered on 10 Mar 2016:
As Lauren, says – there’s no tar present in a cigarette, even though it says how much on the side of the packet.
Organic matter is converted to carbon dioxide, water and other gases if burned in enough oxygen (remember the bunsen burner with the collar open and the gas burns with a blue flame). However, any slow burning organic matter gives off all kinds of nasty materials, and for cigarettes this is called ‘tar’. This is like closing the collar on the bunsen burner and getting a smoky yellow flame.
There are materials called accelerants put into cigarettes to make them keep burning. When these burn they can convert into other hazardous material that are carcinogenic.
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Anais Kahve answered on 13 Mar 2016:
Like the other scientists have pointed out, tar isn’t actually an ingredient in cigarettes. But I have been asking myself a similar question for a very long time: why are people still smoking cigarettes when we know about the health consequences?! This is a complex issue. People seem to smoke because they think it’s cool and want to impress other people. Another reason is money. The UK government taxes cigarettes. This means that they increase the price of the cigarette packet and keep the profit for themselves. I personally think it’s crazy to think that the government is profiting at the expense of peoples’ health. But one argument is that it would be impossible to ban smoking because there will always be people who want to smoke. So instead of banning cigarettes, the government just makes it very expensive to smoke.
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Richard Friend answered on 15 Mar 2016:
People have been burning things and breathing in the smoke for centuries, maybe even longer. Smoking was introduced to the UK back in the days of Elizabeth the first, and native Americans were smoking when Western settlers arrived in the 15th century. We haven’t come very far since then, we’re still growing plants, burning them and breathing in the smoke. The tar that results from the burning of the plants was there the whole time.
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