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My second post in a few weeks about trying to make smoking less harmful. It will always be harmful but if one can make it less so then all the better. I posted before about low tar/nicotine ciggy's, but I have now heard about a trend for smoking your fag through a short plastic holder to stop as much of the crap entering your body. A few people I know at my local pub use them, they come in a box from the newsagent, and each one lasts for several cigarettes. Does anyone know how much of a benefit these are and whether they stop most of the crap entering your body, or just some of it? If you look at the thing after someone has smoked a ciggy it has black blotches on it which is what would have entered your system had you not used it, so that is a benefit surely.

might as well smoke cigs which have activated carbon in the filter - they cut out ca. 75% of the VOCs for a kickoff.

I'm not a smoker but am currently working on a project for the world's biggest cig filter company.

75% of volatile organic compounds such as:
Acetaldehyde
1, 3 Butadiene
Acrolein
Propanaldehyde
Acetone
Acrylonitrile
Isoprene
Butyraldehyde
MEK
Crotonaldehyde
Benzene
Toluene
are removed by specialist activated charcoal i.e. granular carbon filters.

I wouldn't have thought that carbon monoxide and tar etc are influenced by the presence of carbon though which is the main concern.

supersim, tell me more about that. Which brands have the carbon filters (or is a carbon filter just another names for the butt, the filter on a cigarette?). Tell us more please. I'm keen to know. Smoking those Silk Cut Blues as I do (much lower in everything) and smoking them through one of those plastic things, will cut out so much of the crap you normally take down - although I do agree that not smoking at all will obviously be best.

max, the butt is the filter yes.

the spongy white material you see is cellulose acetate - a naturally occuring polymer derived from cotton.

only certain specialist brands have the activated carbon in them - the carbon granules would spill out of a "hidden" central 1cm long by 0.7 cm cavity if you ripped through the centre of the filter.

try it, dismantle a butt of your chosen brand and see if black carbon granules spill out. i doubt it though - yank brands "Lark" and "Parliament" do contain charcoal though.

try find out what the plastic holder items are - i.e. do they contain charcoal to filter out some of the toxins?

supsim, thanks for that. I'll bear it in mind. I may have a couple more questions over the coming days! lol.

i don't know, i work for a filter company not a cigarette company. the CO2 filter we're developing for the NASA spacesuit is a much more enjoyable and stimulating project yes.