Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices. My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices.
My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
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1. TchaoMegot: cigarette butts to down
With the rise of alarming facts regarding cigarettes and their
waste, there have been a few interesting projects that focus
on the recycling of these toxic remnants. One of them is initiated
by the French start-up TchaoMegot, which was launched
in 2019 and has since gained recognition from the GreenTech
Innovation label. The objective of this company is to save cigarette
butts from their usual fate of being incinerated and recycle
them into an insulating material, which they claim is depolluted
and then able to be reused for the stuffing of down jackets.
Diagrams on their website show how once these cigarette
butts are collected, separated and cleaned, they are left with
15% compostable material (ashes, tobacco and paper), 84.7%
of clean fibres that can be reprocessed as insulation material
and 0.3% of extracted toxic concentrates that are correctly
disposed of in specialised laboratories. According to them, 30
litres of cleaned fibres generate only 100 millilitres of effluent
that is left to be treated. The toxicity of the fibre is extracted
without using water or toxic solvent, removing both odour and
toxicity of the material.
Whilst this is an innovative idea, and I by no means mean to
criticise the effort and technological process that has and is
going into this, the first question that arises for me is whether
the material they claim to be compostable really is as such,
or whether the toxins and pesticide remnants from the tobacco
and its smoke have leached into the paper – making them a
hazard when composted. The second, and in my opinion pressing
question, is what actually happens to the 0.3% of extracted
toxic concentrate once it is correctly disposed of, and what the
subsequent treatment actually entails. When confronted with
this question, TchaoMegot’s director Arnaud Paque’s response
was that even though there is interest to look into how to separate
and re-use these toxic components, they would need huge
quantities of these and a substantial amount of money to explore
this solution so it is currently not a priority.
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