Man Made Tobacco, Expended Tobacco and Genetically Modified Tobacco
Waste – scraps, dust, stems, recycled tobacco – are source materials for reconstituted tobacco.
Reconstituted (man-made) tobacco, also known as homogenized tobacco, is made from pieces of tobacco leaf such as dust, stems and by-products. These are finely ground, processed with liquids and rolled into a flat sheet of uniform thickness and quality. In the reconstitution process, nicotine is extracted and then reapplied to the sheet along with other additives so as to control the amount of nicotine in the overall blend. Reconstituted leaf was first proposed as a cigar wrap and for packaging for cigarettes in the mid-1800s. Reconstituted tobacco was first introduced into commercial cigarette production in the United States in the 1950s.
Precise Control
“The Kimberly-Clark tobacco reconstitution process used by LTR INDUSTRIES permits adjustments of nicotine to your exact requirements.”
Reconstituted tobacco producer, LTR Industries, a subsidiary of Kimberly-Clark.
Petri dish of genetically modified tobacco plants
Genetically Modified and Bio-Engineered Tobacco
In the 1980s cigarette manufacturers began investigating genetic bio-engineering of tobacco plants as a way to control nicotine delivery.
Puffed Tobacco
When chemicals like carbon dioxide or Freon are applied to tobacco pieces the tobacco expands. The expanded, puffed pieces are largely empty space (right) and are hence less dense yielding lower machine-measured levels of tar and nicotine.