Tom Szaky collects the most disgusting things. Yucky yogurt containers. Sticky candy wrappers. Old flip-flops. Now, he and his Trenton, N.J., company, TerraCycle, are onto a new one: cigarette butts, the most common litter items on the planet. So bring ‘em on. Let neither stinkiness nor sogginess nor other manner of nastiness be a barrier. Once in hand, the company will “sanitize” and sort the butts, sending the paper and tobacco to a specialty tobacco composter. The filters will be melted and re-formed into pellets, eventually to end up as two different but butt-worthy items — ashtrays and park benches. For every 1,000 butts sent in by a TerraCycle member (find out more atwww.terracycle.com), a dollar will go to the national anti-littering nonprofit, Keep America Beautiful. Szaky said the new butt program “will help to promote our belief that everything can and should be recycled.” It’s part of his plan to “eliminate the idea of waste.” Targeting butts should be easy. They’re everywhere. A 2009 Keep America Beautiful study found that 65 percent of cigarette butts wind up as litter. In a quarter-century of beach cleanups, volunteers for the Ocean Conservancy have picked up more than 52 million butts — the most pervasive item they find. Many beaches now limit smoking to designated areas. Campuses fed up with spending thousands of dollars picking up the things have considered bans. Still the butts come. They are more than unsightly. Peer-reviewed studies have detailed how metals leach from smoked cigarettes. And how chemicals in the butts are harmful to fish, which is relevant because many butts wind up in waterways. Even when butts are picked up — or not littered to begin with — they add to the waste stream piling up in our landfills. Keep America Beautiful has actually studied butt locales. Most (85 percent) wind up on the open ground, followed by bushes or shrubbery, then around — not in — trash receptacles. The final 15 percent get stubbed out in planters.

TerraCycle is a great example of a company using Facebook and Twitter together for a cohesive social strategy that addresses the needs of their audience. The New Jersey-based recycling company has won over 39,800 fans on Facebook and earned an additional 19,600 Twitter followers. Over the past ten years, TerraCycle have built their business turning household waste into creative consumer products into a multi-million dollar enterprise. When it comes to social media, they’re doing just about everything right to generate conversation around their brand, inspire consumers, and engage people across social websites. They blog and regularly publish videos in addition to connecting with people across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Meet the Needs of Your Community by Offering Choices A new visitor to the TerraCycle website or any one of their social accounts can choose how they would like to connect with the brand on an ongoing basis. Their Twitter and Facebook pages are prominently interlinked, allowing fans to choose which platform they prefer. If fans choose to follow the company through more than one social site, TerraCycle has an even greater opportunity to engage the fan more often. On Facebook, they use the About Us section to display their corporate website address and Twitter profile just below the Facebook Page cover image. TerraCycle’s Twitter Page then links to their website and Facebook Page from the space in the Twitter cover image, right at the top of their feed.

Cloth diapering has become popular these days, but cloth toilet paper may be where some people draw the line. Not Christena Little. Little decided to transition her lifestyle to “zero-waste” nearly a year ago, and hasn’t looked back since. One exception Little noted was that her family doesn’t drink cow’s milk, so she still buys almond milk that comes in a container that is only recycled in a few places. However, Little mentioned www.terracycle.com, which lists collection “brigades” that accept items like this. The specific brigade will send you a box to mail them the items and they either make a new product out of the item or find another use for it. While Little admits that she and her family are still working towards becoming as waste-free as possible, she is working to hopefully “get there someday,” she said.

The merchant is collecting cigarette butts in sand-filled buckets this year at the popular holiday market so that they can be recycled into plastic lumber, shipping pallets, lawn furniture and ash trays.“The idea of plastic lumber really resonates with me because I’m a woodworker,” he said. “Instead of covering the beach with cigarette butts, we can build the boardwalk with plastic lumber made out of cigarette butts. How cool is that?”

Kubiak has placed four buckets in the outdoor smoking areas of Christkindlmarkt with a sign that says, “Make your butt useful.” Smokers have responded and the buckets were brimming with butts last week.

Kubiak will send the butts he collects to TerraCycle, a Trenton, N.J., company that specializes in finding ways to recycle items that previously were only sent to landfills. It launched the cigarette recycling initiative in the United States last month, company spokeswoman Lauren Taylor said.

“We worked for more than a year to find a solution for recycling cigarette butts because they are the world’s most littered item and account for 38 percent of all U.S. roadway waste,” Taylor said. “We’ve already collected just shy of 200,000 in the U.S. alone in less than a month. The alternative to recycling cigarette butts is what happens to them now. They go to landfills, get littered along roadways, in parks, public spaces, shopping malls, sidewalks, waterways, etc. They are the No. 1 item recovered during the annual Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup Day.”

The Sea Angels’ mission isn’t only to preserve Palm Beach County’s coast, but also to make the sand and the seas a safer place for the animals that call it home. Cigarette butts are the No. 1 littered substance on county beaches, said Lourdes Ferris, executive director of Keep Palm Beach Beautiful Inc. “Cigarette butts are made from 97 percent plastic fibers and are not biodegradable,” she said. “Animals take them with all their carcinogens and use them to build their nests, and then we find a lot of them in the stomachs of turtles and other animals.” More than 31,000 pounds of litter were collected from county beaches in September, according to Keep Palm Beach Beautiful statistics. Of that amount, cigarette butts made up 23 percent. “It’s not enough to just clean; these things will stay in the environment,” Robyn said. “We have a responsibility to follow through and make changes.” After Sea Angels collects the litter, members reuse the materials to create recycled artwork before dumping it. And any material that is not accepted by the Solid Waste Authority, goes to TerraCycle — a company that makes textiles out of recycled products.

TERRACYCLE has been reusing waste for over a decade, giving it back to the consumer in the form of backpacks, non biohazardous cleaning products, scrapbooks, enviornmentally friendly fertilizers, and more. Check out this IPAD case made from what TERRACYCLE terms “upcycled” materials (think potato chip bags, and cliff bar wrappers). Triple nice!

Har du funderat över vad man kan gör med bläckpennan som har slut på bläck? Lämna till plaståtervinning? Nej, det går inte. Det är inte en förpackning. Har du refill till pennan? Antagligen inte. Alternativet blir sannolikt soptunnan. Eller? Vi på kretsloppskontoret vill ändra på det. Vi har hittat en aktör som tänker som oss när det gäller återvinning – Terracycle. De gör det möjligt att återvinna saker som idag annars skulle slängas eftersom systemet bygger på en överenskommelse med förpackningsindustrin och inte på vilket material det bestå av.

Utmaning

Vill du och din förvaltning eller skola vara med och samla pennor under några månader? För varje insamlad penna går 20 öre till WaterAid. De arbetar med vad som lämpar sig bäst lokalt för att tackla problem med vatten, sanitet och hygien. Livsviktiga frågor.

Hur?

I en kartong eller låda av något slag samlar ni in era pennor som inte fungerar längre. Alla medverkande får affischer att sätta upp som tydliggör vad som samlas in. De insamlade pennorna skickas via internposten till kretsloppskontoret. För friskolor hittar vi en annan lösning. Insamlingen pågår till den 28:e mars 2013. Som belöning till medverkande skolor får varje elev ett kitt med en kruka av återvunnen plast och ekologiskt odlade frön. Förvaltningarna och kontoren får Faitrade-choklad som de kan anordna en härlig fika med.

Skrivredskap som återvinns:

Kulspetspennor Filtpennor Tuschpennor Överstrykningspennor Stiftpennor Korrigering (tejp, flaska och penna)

Återvinns inte:

Linjaler Limstift Suddgummin

Fram till den 31 januari 2013 pågår en stor återvinningstävling med Ella’s Kitchen och TerraCycle.   Tack vare ett samarbete mellan Ella’s Kitchen och det nytänkande återvinningsföretaget TerraCycle kan deltagare skicka in använda barnmatsförpackningar gratis via Posten. Fraktsedlar finns att ladda ner från TerraCycles hemsida. Istället för att använda nytt råmaterial samarbetar TerraCycle med producenter och konsumenter och ser till att skräpet återvinns eller ”upcyclas” till användbara produkter, samtidigt som man sparar på miljön för framtida generationer. För varje inskickad barnmatsförpackning går dessutom 20 öre till välgörenhet i form av välgörenhetspoäng. Läs mer. Published: 21/12/2012