An Interesting Solution to the Problem of Littered Cigarette Butts

Everywhere you go, you can find cigarette butts lying around somewhere. They’re on the sidewalk, on the streets, strewn across parking lots and even throughout parks, beaches, and our own backyards. It doesn’t matter if there’s a trash can or other cigarette disposal bin nearby, people flick them wherever they feel like it and it doesn’t do anyone any bit of good.

Fortunately, one company has come up with an interesting solution for this problem. Since it’s highly unlikely that we will see thousands (or millions) of people quit smoking cold turkey and also unlikely that they’ll stop carelessly flicking their cigarette butts anywhere they please, then the solution lies in changing the cigarette itself.

Green Butts has created a completely biodegradable, 100% environmentally friendly cigarette filter. The filter body is made from organic cotton and natural de-gummed hemp, while a mixture of wheat flour and water hold it all together. Oh, and it includes one other very special ingredient: seeds! That’s right: each of their filters contains a variety of seeds, including: grass, flower, fruit, herb, and tree seeds!

Now, they are quick to note that they do not condone littering, and suggest putting the used filters in your own garden or planter. However, the good news is at least if people use these particular filters, there are no toxic chemicals, and any flicked cigarette butts will quickly biodegrade and sprout little plants of some kind. This is certainly great news, considering that according to their website:

“It is estimated that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts become litter every year.”

That’s a lot of trash—and it can take a regular cigarette butt at least 15 years to biodegrade! The Green Butts filters are currently patent pending, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you see them on the market soon.

Did you know that Cigarette Butts Make Steel Stronger?

This statistic is just mind-blowing: every year, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded. With that in mind, a group of Chinese researchers set out to see if they could give people a reason to recycle butts.

Given that just one butt with a little leftover tobacco attached is enough to poison a liter of water and kill half the fish living in it, a few trillion could potentially do a lot of environmental damage.

Efforts to recycle butts are few and far between, probably because one person doesn't tend to smoke them by the thousand -- and even a pack's worth of spent smokes only make a tiny, insignificant-looking pile of trash.

But boy do they pack a punch. Cigarettes contain all kinds of foul chemicals, including cancer-causing benzenes and heavy metals, to say nothing of the toxicity of nicotine, a natural pesticide produced by tobacco plants. When smoked, at those lovely bits go into the butt (and your lungs, too).

The researchers wanted to find out if this noxious brew had any beneficial applications in the industrial world. 

Oddly enough they did. Chemical extracts from cigarette butts were found to bolster N80 steel -- commonly used in the oil and gas industry -- against corrosion. 

The results were pretty dramatic. In a near-boiling solution of 10 and 15 percent hydrochloric acid (HCl; same stuff as stomach acid), the cigarette-derived cocktail reduce corrosion by between 90 and 94 percent.

Is this a perfect idea, using cigarette butts to help shore up industrial steel? Maybe, maybe not. It's possible that a big chemical company could come along and find a cheap way to produce this protective coating that further damages the environment. 

Interestingly though, the team led by Jun Zhao of Xi’an Jiaotong University found that nicotine was among the active ingredients protecting the steel. So if people are going to smoke anyway, we may as well stop their polluting ways and help out steelworkers in the process.

New faces for Pall Mall and Vogue as BAT changes pack-design

Last Month British American Tobacco (BAT), one of the world’s leading tobacco companies, introduced new styles and modified the design of the packs of Pall Mall and Vogue.

Pall Mall is one of the most outstanding tobacco products in the history of global tobacco industry. It was launched in 1899 in the USA and today it is selling in more than 60 markets being the fifth best-selling brand in the world with great heritage and brilliant quality.

The new varieties of Pall Mall brand are launched in the most popular categories: Super Slims and compact king-size. Namely these two are the only growing segments in the international cigarette market, so the Pall Mall line extensions are expected to be successful. 

Slim and Super Slim cigarettes were launched in European market in the late 1990s, imitating the famous ’100s cigarettes hugely popular in the U.S. The longer cigarettes achieved such an astonishing success that currently all major tobacco companies have super slim brands. For instance, BAT sells Vogue, Pall Mall Slims, Kool, Capri and other brands in Super Slim category.

The introduction of another line of Pall Mall cigarettes – Pall Mall Nanokings will be accompanied by promotional campaigns and advertisement in mass-media, points of sale and in the web. Compact king-size cigarettes make up the latest-created segment in the market, and many smokers are still not aware about it.
The first Compact King Sized cigarette that hit international tobacco market was fellow BAT brand, Kent Nanotek. The cigarettes included in the segment of compact king-size are 83-mm-long, but only 5mm-wide comparing to the 7-mm-diameter of regular king size cigarettes.

Virginia Slims- focused strictly on young professional women

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 Virginia Slims is a brand of cigarette manufactured by Philip Morris. It was introduced in 1968 and directly marketed to young, professional women, under the famous slogan, "You've come a long way, baby." Some media watch groups considered this Virginia Slims marketing campaign to be responsible for a rapid increase in smoking among teenage girls. Later campaigns have used the slogans, "It's a woman thing," in the 1990s, and "Find your voice."

Virginia Slims are much narrower (23mm circumference) than ordinary cigarettes and are also longer than normal "king-sized" cigarettes (which are 84mm), sold only in longer 100mm and 120mm lengths, to give the cigarettes a more "elegant" appearance and ostensibly to reduce the amount of smoke they produce. They are also sold in "Superslims", "light," "ultra-light," and menthol varieties. The packaging is white with vertical colored stripes running along the left side.

Virginia Slims was introduced in September of 1968 by Philip Morris, and marketed as a female-oriented spinoff to their Benson and Hedges brand . The blends, flavorings, color scheme, and overall marketing concepts closely follow the Benson and Hedges model. Early packs (1968-1978) said Benson and Hedges (near the bottom).