Around 10 years ago I was working at a friendly neighborhood hospital in the “Materials Management” department, which meant that I was basically a UPS delivery guy for the different buildings on campus.

At one point, I attended a meeting where budget details for our department and other related departments were overviewed. Interestingly, they had an actual line-item for cleaning up cigarette butts: $42,000 annually. (Or at least, that’s the number my brain recalls, which may or may not be entirely accurate - but in either case it was a fairly large number then, and would be a respectively larger number in today’s dollars.)

It might seem strange that a place - even one as spread-out as the Mayo Clinic - could spend that much money on something as simple as keeping cigarette butts off the sidewalks. That is, until you take look at the math: each year, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts become litter and each of those butts last 1 month to 3 years on the short end (10-15 years on the long end).

Numbers like those make me think that if someone were to find a way to speed up the decomposition process of cigarette filters, not only would that person have found a way to have a significantly positive impact on the environment, they also would have found something that could bring in a lot of cash.

I’m no chemical engineer, but it seems one place to start would be seeing if one of the many carcinogens in cigarette smoke could be used to trigger a secondary process that would accelerate the degrading process. Perhaps some chemical could be embedded in the filter such that, once exposed to cigarette smoke, the chemical would begin to slowly break down, resulting in the gradual falling-apart of the filter - which would then allow the remains to be more readily decomposed by natural processes. Even better would be some reaction that was able to reduce the filter to dust some length of time after the cigarette had been smoked.

It seems to me that such an invention would be pretty easy to sell to cigarette manufacturer. But if a person really wanted to make a lot of money off of their patented invention they could try to get a federal law passed that required the use of such “biodegradability-enhanced filters” for all cigarettes consumed in the US, and then license the technology to all the manufacturers. ;-)

One Response To “Biodegradable Cigarette Filters”

1. Soland   2008.09.24, 4:26 pm
   

   You should submit this to the Google Contest and possibly get that $1M this idea is worth.

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