Every year, 30 billion cigarette butts are thrown into nature, causing massive pollution.
In Finistère, the MéGO company!
is specialized in the recycling of filters, transforming every year 15 tons of cigarette butts into street furniture, tells Fanny Agostini Tuesday in "Our planet" on Europe 1.
With nearly 30 billion cigarette butts discarded each year in nature, cigarettes are a major source of pollution. Tuesday in "Our planet" on Europe 1, Fanny Agostini tells us about a Breton company which has made recycling its core business. Today it processes more than 15 tonnes of cigarette butts each year.
This is a first in France and in Europe.
A company in Bourg-Blanc, in Finistère, specializes in recycling cigarette butts.
Called MéGO !, it tackles the transformation of one of the most common waste in the world, the toxicity of which for nature and for humans is well established.
After analyzing their composition, the young director Bastien Lucas realized that the filters were re-usable.
It is even a monumental mismanagement not to reuse them, because they are made of cellulose acetates, a material derived from plastic that can be used to make new things.
Filters transformed into street furniture
After decontaminating them in a closed circuit, the company transforms the filters into plates which are then used to manufacture street furniture.
It makes benches, chairs, ashtrays and even hand-operated hydroalcoholic gel dispensers, whose tube, base and tongue are 100% recycled.
600 units have already been marketed.
The Breton company processes 15 tonnes of cigarette butts each year, relying on actors who collect them throughout France.
Several million filters already recycled
In doing so, the company is responding to a major ecological challenge.
Sébastien Lucas knows something about it: before creating this company, when he was a business school student, he had set up an association, Terre Océane, to clean the beaches.
It was on the ground that the idea had germinated in his head.
There are indeed some 11 million smokers in France and half of the cigarettes smoked see their filters end up on the ground, passing from the gutters to the streams to reach the oceans.
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Since its creation, the Breton company has recycled several million cigarette filters.
The entrepreneur now wants the cigarette butts to be recycled not to be collected in the wild but rather from selective sorting.
for this he hopes for a collective awareness and greater civility.