Erstellt am: 13. 5. 2011 - 13:35 Uhr
The Cigarette Butt Dress
It’s a fashion statement with a difference. 22-year old student Flore Garcia Bour is making a dress out of hundreds of cigarette butts that she has picked off the streets of Paris to protest against their ecological burden. “I was so shocked about the amount of cigarette butts all over Paris and all over our cities in general. I wanted to do something about that – at least once in my life time.
Bouba M‘Baye
Flore says that world-wide a mind-boggling 4.5 trillion cigarettes are thrown on the ground every year, where they can get tossed about with the wind and end up in places unreachable by the street cleaners.
She insists that her protest is not aimed at the vilifiying those who smoke, she just wants to make them aware of what it means if they carelessly discard the butts in the street rather than taking the time to dispose of them in public ashtrays. “The idea is to sensitize the population to the environmental impact of cigarette butts,” she says.
Because they contain a type of plastic called cellulose acetate in their filters, cigarette butts are not biodegradable. Flore says they can take up to 12 years to break down in the environment, eventually fragmenting into a sort of plastic powder than can be harmful for the soil. When they come into contact with water they leach toxic chemicals which can contaminate water supplies.
Bouba M‘Baye
She says collecting the raw material for her dress wasn’t difficult. She just walked around with a little jar and picked them off the ground. In 20 minute collecting sessions she’d pick up around 500 butts.
Flore Garcia Bour, who has just returned from a study year in South America, hopes that the publicity her dress is attracting will bring donations to her pet projects of reforestation in the Amazon as well as funding for positive development and fair-trade for the forest-dwelling Shipibo tribe.
Her dress is due to be finished this Sunday - the 15th of May. But who will wear it? To combat the stink she is working with sprays containing essential oils but she admits that’s only proving partially successful. She will wear it herself first but hopes that celebrities might want to try it on as well and thereby help spread the ecological message the dress is trying the convey.
“When you begin to do a bit of research,” says Flore, “you realize there is quite an alarming impact of these cigarette butts. And when you think it is so easy to dispose of them in the appropriate places, it is clear that something has to be done.”