Feed the city
Cigarette butts still make up to 35 per cent of this waste. Inside cigarette butts, there is Cellulose Acetate, paper and rayon. The cellulose acetate (which is a form of plastic) is especially hard for the earth to degrade. It can take up to 10 years and even then it will only be degraded to microplastic which is still a major environmental issue.
By feeding the city, we take a different look at cleaning the streets. We see it more as treasure hunting. As collecting precious materials, needed to build the art piece. If we could make something beautiful together by collecting these precious materials, could we start looking at them differently?
What if we could build houses from our waste?
Even though people are more and more aware of the environment. Street waste is still a very big problem. It ends up in our water supplies, Animals eat it and it has a major effect on our environment. Something interesting happens with waste on the streets, when we have it in our hands it is a material, something with a function but as soon as it hits the floor it turns into something gross. We collect almost everything that we need to survive from the ground, But the cigarette is trash. So where do we make the difference? Why is the one material and decorative and the other thing useless? what if we could start to see these butts as material as well?
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In the Netherlands, up to 5 per cent of all trash ends up on the streets. That is estimated between 35 to 140 million kilograms a year.
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The concept of waste is something humans invented. In nature, everything is part of the cycle. The leave that falls from the three plays an important part for the soil and the soil again for the three. The project feeding the city is a doorway for litre, for cigarette butts to become a part of that cycle again.
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*This project was one of the finalists of the 2022 Bio design challenge*