New research from a team at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) says an ideal way to dispose of discarded cigarette butts would be to pave new roads and sidewalks with them.
By doing so, non-biodegradable cigarette butts generated each year would be isolated to one specific place and, in turn, help put a dent in a massive waste problem. The RMIT team also found that cigarette butt-bolstered asphalt helps to reduce thermal conductivity, meaning roads and sidewalks embedded with butts trap less heat from the sun and could potentially help to reduce the urban heat island effect, a phenomenon that makes cities warmer than rural areas.
Dr. Abbas Mohajerani, a senior lecturer at RMIT’s School of Engineering and leader of the research team, said the cigarette butts wouldn’t simply be mixed into asphalt as is and then applied to infrastructure projects as an aggregate.
“In this research, we encapsulated the cigarette butts with bitumen and paraffin wax to lock in the chemicals and prevent any leaching from the asphalt concrete,” he explained. “The encapsulated cigarettes butts were mixed with hot asphalt mix for making samples.” Most importantly, this very special asphalt meets standard traffic requirements.