Taking the pain out of the butt
● After starting out selling roll-ups at a music festival, two university friends are lighting up the smoking market with what they claim are the world’s first eco-friendly craft cigarettes.
Adam van Wyngaarden and Davide Scott, both 23, who founded Smokey Treats three years ago, claim to have found a solution to one of the world’s biggest litter problems by using fully biodegradable materials.
The filters in their Woodland cigarettes are made from wooden strands instead of plastic fibres, and the additive-free tobacco is wrapped in unbleached paper.
The entrepreneurs — both smokers — make no health claims for their product and even say on their website: “We do not advocate the smoking of any tobacco product.”
But they hope the concept of eco-friendly cigarettes will make smoking “more enjoyable and guilt free”. So far it seems to be working, with 30,000 packets flying off the shelves in the first three months of trading.
It was while they were studying social sciences at the University of Cape Town that Van Wyngaarden and Scott became alarmed by the number of stompies littering the campus. They discovered the plastic filters were eventually washed into the ocean and ingested by fish.
“We started putting our own stompies in our pockets or put them back in the cigarette box,” said Scott. “That didn’t work out very well as cigarette stink lingers on your clothes or car. Throwing it in the bin wasn’t always practical either.”
The students started rolling their own cigarettes using unbleached paper and organic tobacco. In 2015 they spent four days rolling cigarettes in a garden shed and sold them in packs of nine at a trance party.
“Before long people were queueing at our camp site and looking for Smokey Treats cigarettes,” said Van Wyngaarden. They sold out in two days.
Woodland cigarettes are now stocked in more than 200 stores, and a first-year sales target of 25,000 packets has already been eclipsed. The 600,000 filters used so far will biodegrade within three months.
“A representative of one of the bigger tobacco companies told us straight to our faces that they would kill us before we put our foot through the door, or would buy us out if we get to 1% of the market.
“We learnt first-hand that competition in the cigarette industry is notorious for being among the fiercest — and downright dirtiest — in the world.
“Now we’ve been told by wholesalers and distributors that this is the fastest-moving brand that they’ve seen in decades.”
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