Smokers around the world throw away enough cigarette butts to circle the globe many times over, and almost none of it ever gets recycled. Now, engineers in Melbourne think they've found a second life for that waste: baking it straight into the bricks that build our homes. According to RMIT University in Melbourne, more than 6 trillion cigarettes are produced worldwide every year, and most of the filters end up as litter, adding up to roughly 1.2 million tonnes of toxic waste dumped into the environment annually. In the 2016 study titled 'A practical proposal for solving the world's cigarette butt problem: Recycling in fired clay bricks', the team led by Associate Professor Abbas Mohajerani found that bricks made out of fired clay and only 1% cigarette butt content had the same compressive strength as common bricks. Further RMIT analysis found that the same mixture reduces brick production energy consumption by 10%.
Why cigarette butts are such a big problem
