These cigarette butts grow into trees when thrown away

An ingenious but flawed idea

In spite of smoking bans, cigarette butts are still the most littered item around the world.

A company in India has come up with a solution though - producing biodegradable roaches that sprout into seedlings once tossed.

The concept is similar to that of GreenButts, which sees discarded cigarettes turn into flowers and grasses, and equally flawed.

Firstly, the product encourages people to litter, or at least care less about disposing of their cigarettes properly, and the introduction of non-native tree species to random areas is ecologically problematic.

As a Reddit user noted, a number of bush fires are thought to have started when people threw cigarette butts out their car windows, so in creating one tree users could end up burning thousands.

5 trillion cigarette butts become litter every year and can take 10 to 15 years to break apart, so there is definitely a problem to be addressed here, the solution just might be more to do with supressing our laziness rather than facilitating it.

(via True Activist)