By Savithri Rodrigo
NEW DELHI (Commonwealth Union)_It’s a community thing, these bear conversations! Women on the outskirts of a village in New Delhi, India sit on the floor of a house, smiling and chatting, while stuffing multi-coloured furry bears with a white fluff-like substance. These bear conversations lead to a finished product, soft toys to be exact, that’s as good as any found anywhere in the world. But there’s something different; the toys are stuffed with cigarette stubs – or rather, material found in cigarette stubs.
With over 267 million tobacco users in India, the second largest country of smokers next to China, the number of cigarette butts being extinguished daily is mindboggling. Having walked along the not-so-clean streets of New Delhi on a daily basis and spying the inordinate number of cigarette stubs strewn around, businessman Naman Gupta brought his entrepreneurial skills to the fore.
Striding the streets, he brought in the ‘butt force’ to collect the millions of stubs found on the city streets. He then gathered a community of women to separate the fibres found in the butts, clean and bleach them. This fibre is then reprocessed to be stuffed into a range of products including soft toys and pillows. The outer layer of the stub is made into recycled paper, while the discarded tobacco becomes compost.
With nearly 30 per cent of India’s population being tobacco users, Gupta is not only cleaning the streets of these pollutants but is also recycling, reusing and repurposing the entirety of the stub amounting to zero waste, while also empowering economically disadvantaged women with a regular income, which is probably what keeps the chatter and laughter continuous as they work.
Having started with just ten grams of fibre per day, Gupta’s productivity has increased to one thousand kilograms per day, which means he is recycling millions of cigarette butts annually.
