Scientists want to bake your nasty cigarette butts into bricks
Turns out, tossed cigarette butts could have a beneficial second life.
A new report has found that using cigarette butts as a material in fired clay bricks could not only put the waste to use, it could help reduce the energy needed to fire the bricks.
Close to 6 trillion cigarettes are produced on the planet each year, Abbas Mohajerani, lecturer in the school of engineering at Melbourne's RMIT University, told Mashable Australia, creating a significant environmental problem.
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The butts and filters end up in parks and waterways and take years to breakdown, all the while leaching their unfriendly chemical ingredients into the environment.
Mohajerani said his team considered adding butts to bricks as a possible solution to the waste issue, because fired clay brick are one of the world's most common types of construction material -- trillions are made each year.
As the butt filters are made of organic matter, they can also help save energy during the firing process. "1 percent butts saves about 9 percent of the energy required to fire the brick," he explained. "Because it is an organic matter it has calorific value -- it's a source of energy."
The quality of bricks made up of 1 percent butts is hardly different from that of normal bricks -- their strength and look is very similar, he said.
Also, when butts are recycled in bricks, their harmful ingredients are destroyed or immobilised. "In fired clay bricks, when we make the mix, we heat up the material to 1,000-plus degrees [Celsius], so complex chemical reactions happen and we end up with a new solid material," he explained.
If rolled out on a significant scale, Mohajerani suggested the impact could be significant. "If 2.5 percent of bricks made worldwide were made up of 1 percent butts, we could solve the littering problem," he said.
It's up to industry and government to take the next step and consider implementing the solution, he added. "It's a big problem everywhere around the world, so we need to start somewhere."
The paper was published in the Journal of Waste Management.
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Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
