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Discarded cigarette butts are a blight on city streets – but now one group of scientists has come up with a way to reuse them to save the environment, the Daily Mail reports.

Researchers from South Korea believe they can convert cigarette filters into a material that could be used by computers, electrical vehicles and wind turbines to store energy.

This material can be used to coat the electrodes of supercapacitors, which are components that can store extremely large amounts of electrical energy.

The researchers claim the material's performance is even better that the commercially available carbon, graphene and carbon nanotubes currently used to do the same job.

Worldwide, around 5.6 trillion used-cigarettes, or 766,571 tonnes, of used cigarettes are flicked onto pavements each year. That's equivalent to the weight of 380 London Eyes.

Co-author of the study Professor Jongheop Yi, from Seoul National University, said: 'Our study has shown that used-cigarette filters can be transformed into a high-performing carbon-based material using a simple one step process, which simultaneously offers a green solution to meeting the energy demands of society.

'Numerous countries are developing strict regulations to avoid the trillions of toxic and non-biodegradable used-cigarette filters that are disposed of into the environment each year—our method is just one way of achieving this.'