The Butt Hike
In 2018, Andreas Noe, a molecular biologist from Germany known as The Trash Traveler, travelled to Portugal to surf on the beaches of Lisbon. Shocked at the sight of all the plastic, he decided to quit his biomedical career to raise awareness about the issue of plastic pollution. Since then, he has embarked on numerous campaigns to spread the message in his typical fun and positive methods.
One of these campaigns, the Butt Hike, is dedicated to cigarette butt prevention. In this campaign, The Trash Traveler, along with a community of 600 people, set about hiking along the Portuguese coast over a period of two months. During this period, they managed to collect over 1.1 million cigarette butts in over 70 initiatives, which are found and displayed in a map on the website.
The Trash Traveler and his team have created artwork made entirely out of the collected cigarette butts and is displaying them across the country to raise awareness in schools, universities; festivals and other events. They are available for booking at events but the intention is for the butts to eventually be recycled in order to build a house that will be used for further awareness events.
You can find information about all the other initiatives on the main page of the website.
