In a bid to reimagine “unpleasant and seemingly worthless” waste, Central Saint Martins graduate Olivia Gino has transformed cigarette butts into a shearling-style hat.

Gino made the textile using cellulose acetate, the polymer that is used to produce the filters of cigarettes.

She got the butts themselves from friends who smoke, local recycling centres, or directly off the floor, where they’re available in abundance – an estimated 4.5 trillion are discarded every year, making cigarette butts the biggest source of litter worldwide.

The hat is made from cellulose acetate, a polymer found in cigarette butts

“Cigarette butts pose a severe environmental threat,” explained Gino, who has titled the project Cigarettes Have Never Been So Cool. “They leach toxic substances into soil and waterways, persist for years in the environment, and severely damage marine ecosystems and biodiversity.”

“As I delved deeper into this issue, I was struck by how normalised and invisible this pollution has become. Cigarette waste is everywhere, yet rarely addressed with the urgency it deserves,” she continued.

“This realisation motivated me to explore how design and material innovation could shift the narrative: what if cigarette butts were not only seen as waste, but as a raw material? The goal is to inspire the public to reconsider waste, demonstrating that if even the most unpleasant and seemingly worthless objects can be transformed into something new, then anything can.”

Gino embroidered over cellulose acetate felt to make it more workable

To begin making the hat, Gino first had to extract the cellulose acetate. This was done by washing the cigarette filters in hot water, then 99 per cent ethanol, and finally doing a cold rinse to extend the cellulose fibres.

These fibres were then layered and pierced repeatedly with a barbed needle, a process that tangles the fibres together into a felt. When this felt proved too weak to work with, Gino embroidered over it to bolster its structural integrity; the final version of the hat features squiggly stitching across its crown.

The graduate also used cellulose acetate to create a shearling-style fabric

The hat also has a thick band of shearling-like fabric around its base, which Gino created by putting rows of short fibres into a rectangular mould that had a layer of melted cellulose acetate at the bottom.

Once it solidified, the fibres were compacted into a strip.

“The resulting project takes the symbolic ‘coolness’ once attached to smoking and redirects it toward recycling,” said Gino.

“The title plays with irony: the idea that products made from recycled cigarette butts can be cooler than smoking itself, transforming pollution into potential.”

She hopes the hat will challenge people’s perceptions of waste

Other exciting projects to come from recent Central Saint Martins alumns include Hinna Khan’s WoolTech electronics, which are powered by conductive wool rather than wiring or circuit boards.

There’s also Doris Xu’s Tilt planter, which moves from side to side as the plant absorbs water so that owners can observe its cycles of growth.

The post Olivia Gino designs turns waste cigarette butts into fuzzy hat appeared first on Dezeen.