Interesting Idea

A new “all natural” cigarette, sporting filters packed with flower seeds so it can be either composted or literally planted to grow plants, hopes to counter the harmful effect cigarettes have on the environment.

I don’t smoke cigarettes, but having grown up with parents who do smoke, I can appreciate how much bulk those little filters can become in the long run.  Sort of imagine if I had to roll up a piece of paper everyday, several times a day, and then flung it out over the yard, street, park, etc, when I was done holding it.  So when I read this article, I thought it was pretty cool to at least see someone being constructive about the solution, instead of the usual “stop smoking stop smoking stop smoking” line, since that’s gotten us so far.

EcoRI writes, “Smoking-related materials represented more than 30 percent of what was collected and disposed of by teams worldwide in 2008, according to the Ocean Conservancy’s 2009 International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) report. The numbers are staggering. Globally, in 2008, ICC teams collected 3,216,991 cigarette filters on beaches and along coastlines and waterways. That number represented a whopping 28 percent, by weight, of all collected debris. Plastic bags ranked No. 2 at 12 percent.”

So clearly cigarette butts are a HUGE issue for our planet if they were able to over-take plastic bags in terms of volume of litter.  Plus, keeping toxic trash out of the ocean is always a boon.  It does however, look like they should take this product one step further:

Perhaps Greenbutts should have embedded tree seeds – after all, around 600 million trees are destroyed every year just to provide fuel to dry tobacco, equating to about one tree killed per 300 cigarettes. Globally, tobacco curing requires 11.4 million tons of solid wood each year. Seems butts should be turned back into trees at every opportunity.