Friday, May 14, 2010

Butt Recycling

Discovery News is reporting that chemicals found in old cigarette butts makes steel stronger.
If this were Fark, there would be a joke here about cancer not being cured yet, but there's a reason why these chemists were messing around with cigarette butts. They're a major source of pollution, since one butt seems inconsequential, but throw ten in a lake and suddenly half the fish abruptly die. So, the more butts can be recycled, the less polluting they will be. (Because now they will be worth money.)
Curiously enough, the chemical that helped the most was nicotine, the very chemical reason that people do smoke in the first place. Nicotine is a strong stimulant that Tobacco plants make to make insects that eat them die of heart failure.
So...if I want to help the steel industry, I should sponsor a tobacco farm. Or something.

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