The Cigarette Factory

Back at the start of my career, in 1992 I spent three weeks working at a cigarette factory in Holland. I was there as part of a team on behalf of the engineering engineering company I was working for at the time. At the cigarette factory the first meeting we had was chaired by the plant manager, who introduced us to his world. The plan was to ramp up production to roughly 75 billion death sticks a year. To put that into perspective, the population of Europe is about 1 billion. And that is the output of just one factory owned by just one (admittedly gargantuan) cigarette producer.

I hope my work at the plant wasn't too productive, because the more productive I was, the more people I have indirectly killed. (I am half joking).

The plant manager, who looked about 150, chain-smoked throughout the meeting. Piles of cigarette packets adorned all meeting rooms and coffee rooms on the site. You were allowed to smoke as as many coffin nails as you liked for free. I doubt those free cigarettes were an entirely benevolent perk on behalf of Philip Morris. You see, employees were not allowed to remove the free cigarettes from the site under any circumstances, so they would have to pay for their addiction when not at work. A member of my team was actually evicted from the site when security guards rifled through his bag and discovered a pack of their "free" cigs. The engineer pleaded that it was an accident (which I'm sure it was, he's an honest fellow), that he had taken them inadvertently, but to no avail. He was granted no second chance and so he was on the next boat back to Blighty.

My task at the cigarette factory was to automate a vacuum chamber. The tobacco would enter the chamber, the doors would close, and the air would be pumped out. This expanded the tobacco so that less of the stuff would be needed to fill a cigarette. It's a little bit like making popcorn except the amount of processing that is needed to turn tobacco leaves, stems and dust into that springy tobacco you find in cigs is astonishing. The stuff is heated, cooled, crushed, chopped, wet, dried, often repeatedly. The machine that puts them into packets is cool. There are thousands of cigs flowing into this thing at once. Tons of leaf whizzed around the factory on endless conveyor belts. It is an awesome sight. It's as noisy as hell too. And I'll never forget the overpowering smell of the factory - pungent isn't the word. I'm not sure my olfactory system has been quite the same since :) Of course much of this processing isn't just to make a few tonnes of leaves go a long way, it is also designed to optimise the nicotine content of the cigs - nicotine that the company claims is not addictive...

See: Smoking Rage


Add your comment to this page

From:	alex	Subject:	cravings	2005-10-03 19:03:51
From:	Tanesha	Subject:	Cigarettes SUCK ASS!	2006-09-27 22:22:46
From:	ash	Subject:	smokeing	2007-11-02 12:51:14
From:	kaylie	Subject:	YOU PEOPLE ARE KILLERS	2008-03-08 22:51:03
From:	poop	Subject:	cigarettes rule	2008-05-16 15:48:17
From:	Andy	Subject:	You are not a killer.	2008-06-08 16:34:53
From:	Cristano Joseph	Subject:	Sup	2010-02-15 08:15:35

View the comments

help: how to add your comment

Page hits: 14701