The plastic ban is well-known now, but the Kuppaikaran movement in Salem focuses on another harmful part of solid waste — cigarette butts, which take years to biodegrade and prevent the percolation of ground water. Now, a group of young people from the city is creating awareness on the environmentally adverse effects of cigarette butts, and the potential for turning them into manure.
S. K. Bharanitharan and N. K. Chytenyan, co-founders of Kuppaikaran, read up extensively on solid waste management in order to understand what could be reused and how value could be created from waste. Cigarette butts absorb and retain 3 ml-10 ml water and cannot be segregated easily once they get mixed up with other solid waste.
Kuppaikaran member Abdul Ghani collected information on Code Enterprise, a company based in Noida in the National Capital Region (NCR), which converts the tobacco and paper in cigarette butts into manure. They also turned the filter into reusable plastic by treating it with a chemical.
Collection boxes
The trio, along with Kuppaikaran members Gowtham Guhan, Harini and Prasanth, collected about 20 kilos of cigarette butts, and sent it to Noida as a trial project. The collective then set-up cigarette butt collection boxes at a couple of tea-stalls and promised the shopkeepers ₹100 per kilo of collected cigarette butts. Within weeks, they had collected about 10 kg of cigarette butts.
“We have sent the cigarette butts to Noida, which has assured us a reasonable revenue,” Mr. Bharanitharan told The Hindu .
Code Enterprise pays them ₹600 per kg of cigarette butts. The group spends about ₹450 per kg for collecting, segregating, packing and forwarding the stock to Noida. They will be making a profit of about ₹150 per kg.
If the project proves to be a success, Kuppaikaran plans to set up 50 collection boxes across Salem. “We cannot restrain smokers from smoking, but we can persuade them to be aware of environmentally safe ways of disposing cigarette butts,” Mr. Bharanitharan says.
