LONDON: Smoking may be increasingly difficult to mix with a successful social life, but those addicted could soon be given the chance to be just a bit virtuous — by going green. Two students have devised a biodegradable cigarette whose butts would gently vanish into the ecosystem, rather than piling up in heaps or cracks in the pavement. Their project, for a design-for-industry degree at Northumbria University in northern England, may find a market after taking first prize in a local authority competition for sustainable brainwaves.

The cigarettes use expandable vegetable starch for their filters and cheap recycled hemp for the paper. The inventors, Lisa Hanking and Lucy Denham, second-year students at Northumbria, also selected organically grown tobacco, so that pesticides would not harm fish or other wildlife as the butts broke down.

Neither of the pair smokes, but both recognize that sad huddles in office doorways are part of contemporary life. “We didn’t want to put the emphasis of our project on the rights and wrongs of smoking,” Ms Hanking said. “If people want to smoke, maybe there’s not much you can do about it. But we we felt that there were steps which could be taken to make the smoking process a greener one.”

Ms Denham said: “People leave cigarette butts on the ground without thinking, yet it takes 12 years for one to biodegrade.”

The pair are also looking at marketing the cigarettes in refillable tins, rather than Cellophane-wrapped cardboard cartons which add to the litter mountain.

Second prize in the contest went to a “hybrid nappy” consisting of a traditional, washable cotton square with a throwaway biodegradable cornstarch underpad. Its inventor, Daniel Barron, said the nappy absorbed solids and helped the environment by reducing disposable nappies’ 15 per cent share of Britain’s landfill waste.

Andy Stephenson, a sustainability officer in local government, said: “These designers may be young, but they have the potential to exert real power over the way all of us will be living our lives in the future.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service