Eco Fashion World

It sounds like the strangest thing ever, but Chilean designer Alexandra Guerrero makes clothing out of cigarette butts. The Mantis Project began when Alexandra was preparing a graduation thesis. Ever aware of the vast amount of cigarette butts in the city of Santiago de Chile, she started thinking about what could be done with them and came up with a way to mix the tissue of the filter with natural wool to create a rustic-looking thread that could be knitted into all kinds of garments. She got help from environmental engineer Carolina Leiva who conducted a study to make sure that the purified butts were safe to use. The purification process begins with the cigarette butts going through autoclaves. They are then washed in a polar solvent and go through the autoclaves again. After that they are rinsed and dried, and, finally, shredded to create a wool-like material. The end-result textile contains 20% recycled-cigarette filter material with which the designer has produced a vest, a poncho, a dress and a hat. Of the 5,000 cigarette butts she has recovered from the streets so far and turned into this exciting material, Guerrero has even been able to mix it with soap to make an exfoliating product. It might not be the ultimate solution to the huge problem of cigarette litter, but neither is it a bad way to raise awareness about what can be done with otherwise dreadful waste material.

From Treehugger.

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