CODE Recycles Cigarette Butts
Meet Recycling Entrepreneurs Naman And Vishal
In order to put an end to this misfortune, two Indian entrepreneurs named Naman Gupta and Vishal Kanet initiated a company called CODE to bring a water recycling resolution to the world. The idea came to them at a friend’s party in 2016 when they pondered what to do with accumulated waste cigarette butts. They decided to come up with a recycling solution to save mother nature.
How Naman and Vishal Started Code
In 2016, Naman and Vishal founded ‘CODE’ in the National Capital Region, in Noida, India, and the two spent months on research and development to come with an procedure to transform cellulose acetate into a new substance.
How Naman and Vishal are Making a Difference
The plan was to collect cigarette butts from smoking consumers’ homes, shopkeepers, public ashtrays, and garbage dumps into collecting units dubbed Vbins. The cigarette butts, gathered every 15 days, were segregated it into two parts.
The tobacco leftovers and the cigarette butt covers go through decomposition and are used to produce manure and mosquito repellants. While the other lot, made out of the filters, is treated and recycled to be utilized in cushions, stuffed toys, and packing material.
Naman says the filter recycling methodology was a masterpiece developed by Vishal, adding, “In the coming five to ten years we hope, we will manage cigarette waste from all over India.”
But are the Safe Products?
The fertilizer produced out of the cigarette butts is supplied to gardeners while the recycled, sterilized filters are deemed 99.9% clean and safe to use in cushions and stuffed toys. In the initial stage, CODE faced backlash and little interest from potential partners.
The partners set up an outreach plan to pay money to those supplying them cigarette butts, and soon they were inundated with crowds gathering waste in bulk. The company began offering 700 Indian Rupees for each kilo of cigarette waste material, and they spread their operation across 250 districts in India.
Insights on Cigarette Waste
Every year over one hundred billion cigarette butts are dumped into landfill areas in India alone. This is not counting the million cigarette butts that are discarded in streets and the countryside.
One of the components of cigarettes is cellulose acetate, which is a type of non-biodegradable plastic element that endures for 10 years before decomposing. Global estimates of cigarette waste is close to 4.5 trillion cigarette butts annually.
These microplastics make their way to the oceans and soil, and new analysis shows that just one cigarette butt in half a liter of water can kill a fish proving that cigarettes are not just detrimental to health but can have catastrophic effects on marine life.
Learn more about Code.
Source: Swachhindia.ndtv.com
