Cigarette butts (and cigarettes in general) are pretty dangerous. The butt of the cigarette is where the filter is, so it absorbs most of the poison from the cancer stick before it goes into your lungs, which is why casually-discarded cancer sticks are so poisonous that they kill fish when fish eat them. However, as it turns out, what kills living things just might be what saves steel. A group of Chinese chemists, guided by Jun Zhao from Xi’an Jiaotong University’s School of Energy and Power Engineering and funded by the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, say that chemicals from cigarette butts protect steel from corrosion.
Every year, millions of dollars are spent replacing the steel in oil pipes. However, coating the steel in a cocktail of nine chemicals recovered from discarded cigarettes has proven to be a strong method of combating the corrosion when used on N80 steel pipes. Researchers aren’t for sure which of the chemicals extracted is the steel’s savior, or if it’s a cumulative effect. However, it is believed that this will increase recycling efforts in heavy-smoking places like China. Those trillions of cigarette butts may save millions of bucks!
Tags: cigarette butts, cigarette butts protect steel, chemicals, N80, Jun Zhao, Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, toxic chemicals from cigarette butts protect steel, anti-corrosive chemicals found in cigarette butts, Xi’an Jiaotong University’s School of Energy and Power Engineering