Cigarette butts can power computer, gadgets - study

MANILA, Philippines – There are billions of smokers worldwide, World Health Organization (WHO). Tobacco has been known to be a major health and environmental problem, but South Korean researchers have found a way to at least transform those toxic cigarette butts into something useful.

A group of South Korean researchers at the Environmental Material and Process Lab at Seoul National University said cigarette butts can be turned into supercapacitors. These are devices that store energy in electrical charges rather than chemical reactions. Could this mean we can use cigarette butts as chargers in the near future?

According to a paper published in the journal Nanotechnology. Those discarded cigarette butts on the street could potentially be used to run computers, electric vehicles and wind turbines. The researchers claim the material's performance is even better than commercially available carbon used to do the same job.

Cigarette filters are mostly composed of cellulose acetate fibers. By a burning technique called pyrolysis, these could be converted into a carbon-based material, which contains a number of tiny pores that contribute to its high surface area making it a supercapacitive material which  stores more power, charges quicker and lasts longer than available storage alternatives.

“There is already numerous research [showing] that carbon material can be synthesized by pyrolysis of plastic material,” Minzae Lee, one of the paper’s authors, writes. “So we expected that the transformation of cigarette butts into an energy storage material might be a solution to two human-challenging issues, environmental and energy problems.”

According to anti-smoking Americans for Non-smokers’ Rights, cigarette butts contribute more than 765,000 tons of waste annually. Now, with the new science breakthrough, those toxic materials could be a green initiative to help, albeit in a small way, in resolving energy problems.