Rarely will you find beneficial use for cigarette butts as they can leak toxic chemicals like arsenic, lead, and nicotine into the environment. So they mostly end up becoming a major source of pollution. But Central Saint Martins graduate Olivia Gino turned them into raw material for a fuzzy hat in her project called “Cigarettes Have Never Been So Cool.”
She collected butts from floors, friends who smoke, and from local recycling centers and used their plastic filters. The filters are made from non-biodegradable cellulose acetate. Fist, she washed the filters in hot water then in 99 percent ethanol. Finally, she rinsed them in cold water to extract the cellulose acetate.
Olivia Gino then layered and repeatedly pierced the extracted polymer fibers with a barbed needle to form a felt. She embroidered over the felt to enhance its structural integrity. The process renders a hat with squiggly stitching across the crown.
Gino then added a thick band of shearling-like fabric around the hat’s base. She first put rows of short fibers into a rectangular mold that had a layer of melted cellulose acetate at the bottom. Once solidified, she then compacted the fibers into a strip.
“The goal is to inspire the public to reconsider waste, demonstrating that if even the most unpleasant and seemingly worthless objects can be transformed into something new, then anything can,” Gino told Dezeen of her project.
She said the hat redirects the symbolic “coolness” formerly attached to smoking towards recycling. The “Cigarettes Have Never Been So Cool” title is a play at irony. “The idea that products made from recycled cigarette butts can be cooler than smoking itself, transforming pollution into potential,” she explained.
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Images courtesy of Olivia Gina/Instagram
