Cigarette Butts Recycled into Fashionable Clothing

Cigarette butts are everywhere; in our roads, pavement, and parks – practically anywhere you can think of. It is estimated that 4.3 trillion cigarette butts are discarded each year around the world.

Yes! These cigarette butts are bad. But…

A Chilean fashion designer called Alexandra Guerrero, appears to have come up with something quite fashionable.  She, instead of letting those cig butts to fill up the ashtrays, has nicely recycled them into stylish clothing which includes a dress, hat, poncho, soaps and a sweater. Total of 5000 cigarette butts were used in this process.

How the clothing is made?

According to the designer,

After cleaning the cigarettes butts, they are dyed in different colors, then I separate the cigarette fibers and finally they are spun with natural sheep wool. At the end, every garment has 10% material from cigarette butts and 90% sheep wool. We expect to increase this percentage in the future with better financing.

She has been able to collect theses cigarette butts from the streets and with the help of her smoking friends. The collected cigarette butts were then cleaned and treated for contaminations before subjecting them into other processes in the production.

“The purification process begins with the cigarette butts going through autoclaves (a pressurized sanitation process). They are then washed in a solvent; they go through the autoclave again, are rinsed and dried, and, finally, are shredded to create a wool-like material. The resulting liquid byproduct is also being donated to be tested as a biological insecticide for plant pest control.”

What’s more?

The clothes are said to be as durable as any other regular wool-made clothing materials.

However, for us the dress doesn’t seem much hygienic as the cloths still could have smaller amounts of certain toxic substances left.

Via: Green Muze