venky

Table of Contents

Enactus of Venky has taken up an impressive initiative step to clean  the city. This time it is Cigarette butts. Under the project “CiggB” by Enactus Shri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi students are going to collect the cigarette butts and recycle it. This will not only save the environment but help the poor also since wages ll be given to those who ll pick it from the surroundings.

The “CiggB” team has about 7 female and 4 male rag pickers from the slums who ll be paid for their work to collect the butts. So far more than 75 kgs of cigarette butts from Delhi have been collected. “Physically speaking, cigarettes are composed of more than cotton and tobacco nestled inside a paper wrapper. This is a common misconception and if it was the case perhaps the cigarette butts could have degraded naturally in nature” Enactus SVC said.

As per the latest Annual Litter Survey done by Dept. Of Environmental Regulation the most common form of litter we find around is cigarette butts. More than 4.5 trillion cigarettes are smoked around the world in a single year.

CiggB team said ” It is the physics composition of the cigarette that makes the half the trouble for the environment. The chemical composition of a cigarette is the other half of the problem for the planet. The filter in most of the cigarettes are designed to protect the smokers from harmful chemicals is actually a type of plastic called Cellulose Acetate, which pollutes the environment and especially aquatic ecosystem. So the solution to this massive problem of cigarette disposal is our project. “

After the collecting the butt of cigarettes it goes under processing where the paper part are removed to make compost. And the main harmful part of the butts” Cellulose Acetate ” goes through cleaning and separation of toxic chemicals present in them. When the whole process gets completed it is reused for purposes like making of Stuff Toys, mattresses etc.

~Siddharth Anand

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here