In the time you take to read this sentence more than 12,000 cigarette butts would have been trashed in India. Explaining what a massive challenge they pose to the environment, founder and director of Code Effort, Naman Gupta says that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are disposed of globally every year, of which a 100 billion are in India.
This is why Code Effort focusses on finding practical ways to upcycle them. Which led to an intriguing collaboration with Reliance Retail, resulting in Lee Cooper’s latest launch: jeans made from cigarette butts.
“We’re rewriting the fashion playbook by turning unusable into sustainable” says Jayesh Sali, head of marketing at Reliance Retail (Fashion & Lifestyle). Explaining that each pair of jeans is made from about 600 cigarette butts, he says, “We realise that we need to recycle them and eliminate them from our environment. So we worked with Code Effort to create an innovative product.”
