Cigarette butt Recycling

Long description

This Circular design for cigarette butt and packaging recycling has been developed to address the environmental pollution effects and loss of resources experienced due to the improper disposal of cigarette butts. If effectively developed and adopted, this design has the potential of facilitating the recovery of over 70 percent of cigarettes sold worldwide, thereby massively upscaling cigarette butt recycling activates and primary packaging recovery for Recycling. Each cigarette stick has been designed to have a bottom “quench” container made of plastic containing a coolant.

Coolants could include CO2-enriched water in just a sufficient quantity and covered by a thin plastic film that is easily penetrable by the cigarette butt to be quenched. The thin plastic film has been improvised using a tape across the small water containers.

The bottom cooling component is separated from the cigarette sticks using cardboard paper. This is to prevent the damage of the water container and subsequent wetting of the cigarette sticks.

Long cylindrical containers made of paper or foils have been developed to hold each cigarette stick inside the pack. The idea is to return each cigarette butt back to their respective cylindrical containers after quenching. Note that the design has been experimented with by improvising material use.

Improved and mechanized implementation of this design idea would permit the collection of 20 cigarettes per pack as in standard cigarette packs.

The completely used-up cigarette pack (filled with the corresponding cigarette butts) can then be returned to the nearest collection or recycling center.

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