Cigarette butts are the most littered item in the world, with roughly 4.5 trillion being tossed worldwide each year.
Studies by World Health Organization (WHO) point out that a cigarette butt contains 165 toxic chemicals. These chemicals leech into the environment when discarded. 95% of cigarette butts are made of cellulose acetate, which looks like cotton but is a thermoplastic that may take hundreds of years to decompose.
Now, an Indian start-up Code Effort has come up with an inventive way to combat this environmental concern.
Code Effort makes soft toys from recycled cigarette butts. Established in 2018, Code Effort has over 250 collection centers that engage more than 2,000 people. It has reprocessed over 300 million cigarette butts into a range of products including toys and pillows so far.
According to the 28-year-old entrepreneur Naman Gupta, “Merely stating smoking is injurious is pointless. With my involvement in building cigarette waste management and recycling, I can confidently say that cigarettes are not only injurious to human health, but they are also lethal to the planet’s health.”
Code Effort has licensed the technology to other units in South Asia to keep the environment clean.
