Scientists find use for cigarette butts

[DiamondDave]

China scientists find use for cigarette butts - Yahoo! News

Just thought it interesting... as a person who has been trying to quit smoking thru various means and as a person who loves little science blurbs

Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect steel pipes from rusting

 

[uscitizen]

umm that is why we throw the butts away.

Killing fish? Try living in all that water like they do..

And Bush said humans and fish can peacefully coexist.
sheesh.

 

[boedicca]

Oh no. Yet another bin for separating garbage.

 

[xsited1]

China scientists find use for cigarette butts - Yahoo! News

Just thought it interesting... as a person who has been trying to quit smoking thru various means and as a person who loves little science blurbs

Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect steel pipes from rusting

Maybe the US should dump about a million cigarette butts into the Gulf of Mexico and see if that plugs up the oil leak. After that, we could have a huge fish barbecue with all the dead fish.

 

[DiamondDave]

Oh no. Yet another bin for separating garbage.

I don't mind that though... I willingly use our community recycle program.. though we don't have to finely separate.. we can have plastic, paper, bottles and cans all in the same bin... but I would gladly put butts in a can for recycling... plus you would think that certain companies (like the ones who buy restaurant grease) may turn it into a business where you get a little and they get more when they sell to the companies that could use the end product....

never the less... interesting

 

[DiamondDave]

China scientists find use for cigarette butts - Yahoo! News

Just thought it interesting... as a person who has been trying to quit smoking thru various means and as a person who loves little science blurbs

Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect steel pipes from rusting

Maybe the US should dump about a million cigarette butts into the Gulf of Mexico and see if that plugs up the oil leak. After that, we could have a huge fish barbecue with all the dead fish.

Nah... better to use 3 years worth of tampons for that

LOL

 

[Nate]

Oh no. Yet another bin for separating garbage.

I don't mind that though... I willingly use our community recycle program.. though we don't have to finely separate.. we can have plastic, paper, bottles and cans all in the same bin... but I would gladly put butts in a can for recycling... plus you would think that certain companies (like the ones who buy restaurant grease) may turn it into a business where you get a little and they get more when they sell to the companies that could use the end product....

never the less... interesting

Very interesting! One of most disgusting things about that habit are the cigarette butts thrown onto the ground or out the window of the car. There isn't a street you can walk down without seeing them on the sides and this is coming from a smoker. If something like this was to become a market, I could see people collecting them from the streets to turn into the local recycling center like soda cans. win-win in my book.

 

[PoliticalChic]

China scientists find use for cigarette butts - Yahoo! News

Just thought it interesting... as a person who has been trying to quit smoking thru various means and as a person who loves little science blurbs

Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect steel pipes from rusting

Well, you are certainly not alone, as a tobacco addict. Timothy Brook uses an explanation of tobacco as a vehicle of commerce, and shows that every nation that was exposed to the weed became addicted to it.

This may interest you- or not:

1. In 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew were the first non-Americans to see indigenous people of the Americas smoke, though Amerigo Vespucci gets the credit for making the first reference to tobacco in print, in 1505. Jacques Cartier tasted tobacco in 1535. Champlain observed tobacco in 1599, describing it as “a kinde of herbe, whereof they take the smoake.” And when Indians feted the French in 1603, he offered them tobacco: Champlain called the gathering a ‘tabagie’.

2. Native tobacco had a nicotine content many times higher than what is now smoked, and induced psychotropic effects and trances, and was thought to ease a wide variety of complaints. The analgesic properties of tobacco were thought to give smoking medicinal as well as religious properties, realms that overlapped in seventeenth-century pharmacology.

3. Tobacco moved along the webs of trade, Europe first. And with smoking went religious, medical, social and economic practices. Transculturation is a term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1947 to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. Wherever tobacco showed up, a culture that did not smoke became a culture that did. Continuing the connection with the spiritual, the Christian clergy- with the exception of the Jesuits, became avid smokers. So much so that the Vatican told priest that they could not smoke in church. Sailors, soldiers, and priests were the first European smokers.

4. The first botanical entry on tobacco to appear in a medical text was by Rembert Dodoens, 1553, and this evidenced that the tobacco plant itself had arrived in the Low Countries. He didn’t know what to call the plant, so he borrowed the name of a plant with a similar flower, and some narcotic properties with which he was familiar: henbane. In Portugal, Damiao de Goes claimed that his kinsman was the first to bring tobacco from Brazil prior to 1553. Tobacco traveled to France when de Goes gave Jean Nicot seeds from his garden, and he brought it to the Queen, Catherine de Medici, in 1566. Thus the scientific name for tobacco: Nicotiana.

5. In 1591 in Mexico, Juan de Cardenas listed the medicinal properties of tobacco based on the reports of Spanish soldiers who used it to stave off hunger, thirst and cold, stating that it kept them ‘warm and healthy.” With this understanding, it fit in well in England’s cold, damp climate. By 1597, every English apothecary was prescribing tobacco!

6. At the turn of the century, Virginia tobacco was but a novelty, yet smokers were willing to pay its weight in silver. High duties and high prices for Virginia tobacco set the scene: control of the supply. Europeans began to set up plantations, and by about 1610, colonization was no longer speculative, but affordable and profitable. As beaver pelts funded French exploration in the north, tobacco gave the English impetus to transplant themselves to Virginia and dispossess Natives.

7. But tobacco farmers found that the supply of labor was sorely lacking. Indians would not do the work, the solution was to find those who had to work- slaves. Starting in the 1630’s, the Dutch West Indian Company bought slaves in Africa, sold them to plantation owners in the Caribbean and Brazil. The new system of trade that emerged was tobacco and sugar from the Americas, slaves from Africa worked plantations in the Americas and silver mines in South America, and this paid for goods from Europe and the Americas to Asia. So, it was on the trinity of silver, tobacco, and slaves that the colonization of the Americas rested.

For a fuller and much more interesting telling of tobacco’s influence on history, see “Vermeer’s Hat,” by Timothy Brook.

 

[Nolow]

I Am an 18 Student in central Texas and was working on a research project for renewable energy,

During my research I read a few of the issues with geothermal energy, the main problems
that seem to make geothermal energy costly is management. The pipes corrode quickly
and replacement for the pipes is not only costly for the new pipes but for the labor of
installing and cleaning any muck left from waste by product of Geothermal plants. If we
could implement the use of the chemical in cigarettes for the maze of pipes and exposed
steel, we could "hopefully with no unforeseen issues" cut the cost of maintaining a plant.