Cigarette butts are a massive source of pollution, but Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia, has come up with a way to recycle them into something useful. The city is collecting as many cigarette butts as it can to be turned into asphalt roads.
The city's waste management firm will place receptacles for cigarette butts at public events starting this year. Those butts will then be processed by two companies, SPAK-EKO and EcoButt, into special fibers that can then become an admixture for the preparation of asphalt.
Governments all over the world have been struggling to figure out how to mitigate the environmental damage caused by cigarette butts, which, according to the CDC, are "the largest single type of litter by count and their filters do not biodegrade." They have also been called "the biggest man-made ocean contaminant."
In addition to not being biodegradable, cigarette butts leach toxic substances like arsenic and lead into the soil or water where they are discarded.
Some governments have opted to crack down on cigarette smoking overall to both improve citizens' health and lessen the pollution from discarded butts. New Zealand, for instance, effectively banned smoking for future generations by creating a law that prevents anyone born after 2008 from buying cigarettes.
Other governments, such as Spain's, are passing on the cost of cleaning up the butts to the tobacco companies themselves.
One city in Sweden employs a cleaning crew of trained crows, which pick up cigarette butts off the ground and deposit them in a special machine in exchange for a treat.
An Australian company has developed a method of using mushrooms to break down cigarette butts.
Slovakia's method, however, is the first that actually takes discarded cigarette butts and turns them into something of use. EcoButt has already completed its first road, proving that the method is viable.
"If visitors to a festival, run, market or other urban event throw cigarette butts into a special container, they will contribute not only to a cleaner environment but to the material recovery of this type of waste," Martina Čechová, a manager of Bratislava's waste management firm, said in a press release.
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