Keep Alachua County Beautiful began working with TerraCycle earlier this year, to recycle cigarette butts and install eight new receptacles downtown. For 30 years, Keep Alachua County Beautiful has collected cigarettes littering Gainesville streets. Now, for the first time, the nonprofit will recycle them. The organization started a new partnership with TerraCycle earlier this year, to recycle cigarette butts and install new receptacles. It has already installed at least eight in the downtown area. Gina Hawkins, the organization’s president, said cigarettes are the most littered item in the U.S. She believes a cleaner city will help stimulate more economic investment. “When people throw cigarettes, it sends a message to visitors and investors that this community doesn’t care,” Hawkins said. Any collected cigarette ashes, papers, plastics, filters and cartons will be sent to TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company that offers free recycling programs funded by companies and manufacturers. The company will then repurpose the remains into other items such as hard plastic shipping pallets. For every pound of cigarette litter collected, the company will donate $1 to KACB’s parent organization Keep America Beautiful. The receptacles vary in size, but each one can hold approximately 10 pounds of cigarette butts. Sam Schatz, a sustainability intern at KACB who spearheaded the project, collects cigarettes from local restaurants and receptacles around town every day. People are more likely to properly discard their cigarettes in ashtrays provided by restaurants, he said. When restaurants and bars like Dragonfly Sushi and the High Dive partner with groups like KACB, it allows Schatz to recycle a larger amount of cigarette butts at a time. Mainly functioning off donations, the organization has installed new cigarette receptacles from a $5,000 grant it received from the state. Older receptacles, big plastic containers bolted to the ground at street corners, were vandalized, Schatz said. Oftentimes people have either disregarded them, knocked them over or tossed their cigarette butts on the street. These new receptacles are “drunk-proof,” Schatz said. Nailed to walls of buildings and made of stainless steel, the receptacles are much sturdier. He hopes that more people will be more likely to discard their cigarette butts since the containers are located at eye level. “This needs to happen because you live in the community and in one way, shape or another, you contribute to it,” Schatz said. Hawkins hopes that KACB will place receptacles in what she calls transition places, such as parking lots or hospitals, where people are more likely to discard their litter before they head indoors. Otherwise, chemicals from the cigarette litter run the risk of traveling into stormwater drains where they can get into creeks and rivers, she said. “It sounds so simple, but that litter has a huge impact when it blights a community,” Hawkins said.