Timelapse of Cigarettes Left in Soil for an Entire Year | Hacker News Reader

Timelapse of Cigarettes Left in Soil for an Entire Year

petapixel.com

49 pointsdev_tty0143 comments

This is why when I occasionally smoke, I prefer smoking small cigars. Its dried wrapped leaves. It will decompose fast and (to my knowledge) is not doped with combustion regulators; they will extinguish pretty fast if left alone, whereas a cigarette will cleanly burn all the way.

Another perk is how expensive they are compared to cigarettes, it's a natural counter to nicotine addiction.

> whereas a cigarette will cleanly burn all the way.

This may be region/regulation dependent, if you've noticed that. I don't smoke that often, but IIRC my cigarettes (in France) would extinguish after a while, without consuming themselves.

Canada has a regulation for a self extinguishing requirement.

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/smoking-toba...

So is this done by adding something to encourage it to extinguish? Or by taking away what was previously there that let it keep burning?

It's known under the name FSC and explained here for each region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-safe_cigarette

You clearly need to go back to Smokey's fire safety class.

Remember the fire triangle! There's only one thing you can easily change for a ciggy

Well, there's also another way, you could add much more smoke. If no oxygen, no fire, right :D ?

> So is this done by adding something to encourage it to extinguish? Or by taking away what was previously there that let it keep burning

Taking it away

Hand rolled cigarettes go out.

You can, or used to be able to, buy cigarette papers that do not go out. Made by tobacco company ("Drum")

Are you sure? Afaik it is an additive to keep the cigarette alight. American spirits are missing that and will go put (as does pot and most any other dried plant)

This is the case in the US as well, or at least in the parts of it I’ve lived (Washington, Illinois.) This wasn’t true when I was a kid though, it’s a recent regulation.

It was the early 2000s IIRC. New York was one of the first (if not the first) states in the Union to introduce the requirement. At the time Vermont did not have the requirement so we used to drive over there to buy our smokes. The only thing on the packaging that indicated the difference was a little black bar above the UPC on the packs sold in New York (at least for the brand I bought).

Afaik an EU regulation to prevent house fires (people who fall asleep with a burning cigarette). I think it changed somewhere around 2010.

Used to smoke American Spirit, which claimed to be "100% additive free". They would go out is not puffed on, which I always assumed was because there wasn't saltpeter &etc. in the mix

They taste and smell better too.

And this is why I smoke filterless cigarettes

Won't that kill you faster? What does your pulmonologist say?

or don't smoke

1. What are the little specks that appear to be moving around the soil from the very beginning of the video? Some kind of mite? Nematode?

2. Is it really this easy to get a closed ecosystem going? I suppose the rubber seal is still somewhat permeable, but I assumed the oxygen in the jar would be depleted quickly, and all that would be left would be anaerobic bacteria. In this jar he seemed to have fungus and plants growing, and the little specks (if alive) kept going the whole time.

Closed ecosystems are almost a genre on YouTube. And no, it's quite difficult to get them stable.

It's interesting that it's basically just the filters left at the end.

Do the filters actually help enough to justify their existence and environmental impact?

It's not just the filter, it's also the chemicals in the tobacco

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...

The whole thing is toxic for the environment

Your link pertains to health not environment. Most of the ingredients listed are in smoke. Inhaling any burnt plant matter isn't healthy.

I'm not sure how a decomposing plant in itself can harm the environment. I could imagine that synthetic additives are, but these seem to be overstated.

> Inhaling any burnt plant matter isn't healthy.

That feels that it should be true. But epidemiological studies of pure cannabis smokers (hard to find) do not bear it out. Lungs seem to cope

Cope doesn't inherently mean is Great.

My understanding of this effect is in part that cannabis smokers just don't end up smoking as much mass that tobacco smokers do.

> toxic for the environment

Not sure how true this is. The chemicals from the tobacco (aside from additives which I'm sure they're negligible in this context as the plant is not combusted) are.. from the environment? Nicotine is a pesticide so that would make it more toxic for certain parts of the environment, but I'm sure the environment will be fine consuming cigarettes. Way better than say a piece of plastic...

(some) cigarette filters do contain plastic, so that's not ok, but the tobacco part should be fine.

>The chemicals from the tobacco (aside from additives which I'm sure they're negligible in this context as the plant is not combusted) are.. from the environment?

PFAS, phosphates, CFCs, carbon monoxide, and BPA are all "from the environment", too.

What a weird comment. Especially calling out carbon monoxide, which is emitted only if the cigarette burns in this context but otherwise it is ubiquitous in nature and even used as a signaling mechanism by living organisms.

That's my point. Just because things are "from the environment" doesn't mean they aren't toxic or pollutants.

We need to have cigarettes use bio-degradable filters and then they'll be totally cool!!

edit: /s

The filters are made of cellulose acetate, which also biodegrades (though more slowly than paper and tobacco):

"Degradation of Cellulose Acetate-Based Materials: A Review"

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10924-010-0258-0

Estimates for the degradation time of cellulose acetate filters vary widely, but they can range from several months to more than a decade, depending on environmental conditions.

It's important to note that even though cellulose acetate might break down over time, it doesn't truly biodegrade in the same way that organic materials like food waste do. Instead, it fragments into smaller pieces called microplastics, which can persist in the environment for much longer and have their own set of environmental and health concerns.

The end state of biodegradation is "mineralization" where complex molecules are fully broken down to simple ones like water and carbon dioxide. Cellulose acetate will mineralize as fully as food waste does, but it takes longer than food waste.

See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/app.1993.070... for a discussion of microbial cellulose acetate mineralization (full article accessible through sci-hub).

"Considering the harmful potential of PM, our findings note that the filter-tipped cigarettes are not a less harmful alternative for passive smokers. Tobacco taxation should be reconsidered and non-smoking legislation enforced."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4847091/

Cigarette "Filters" are marketing. They have never made cigarettes safer, and in the early days they were often asbestos, so that's fun.

This article is written a bit oddly, no? “The comment section is full of praise for the photographer.”

Sounds generated.

Yeah it's "blogspam"(?) for an YT video basically

interesting watching the mycelium start to eat it, only to seemingly die almost instantly.

Everyone's talking about how they would smoke different cigars/cigarettes. And here I am just wanting everything in a jar timelapse in dirt...

Shades of the infamous StinkyMeat there.

Time to ban the cotton industry

How do you reach that conclusion?

Filters are not cotton, they are plastic.

Putting a picture of fake cork texture on them doesn't make the biodegrade any faster!

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