Taking a bad habit and making something good come from it. That was the idea DYNA-MIG quality and environmental and systems specialist Angela Blum had when she suggested the Stratford automotive components manufacturer begin participating in TerraCycle’s Cigarette Waste Recycling program back in 2012. “I got the idea from an environmental news blitz, and I read through it and I thought this looks pretty good because we want to reduce waste. Cigarette butts are plastic, so the stuff that isn’t smoked goes into compost, but the actual butt, the filter, is plastic. So (TerraCycle) makes plastic pallets and tote bags out of it,” Blum said. TerraCycle is an international recycling company that finds innovative solutions for materials not typically accepted at municipal recycling facilities. The company repurposes the waste collected through programs like its Cigarette Waste Recycling program into sustainable and affordable materials and consumer products. In 21 countries around the world, the waste is collected by individual collectors, consumer product companies, manufacturers, municipalities and small businesses through programs that, in return, donate money to a collector’s chosen school or charity. Since 2013, when the DYNA-MIG facility in Stratford fully implemented the program, employees have sent almost 600,000 cigarette butts – about 500 pounds of material -- off to Toronto to be recycled at no cost to the company. Since TerraCycle pays for the shipping, those in charge of orchestrating DYNA-MIG’s participation in the program need only print off the shipping labels and call UPS to come pick up the boxes. “At our smoking shelter that’s outside, we have 12 collection stations where employees put their cigarettes and the butts and everything goes in there. Then they’re collected in the pales. They have to be stirred for seven days to make sure there’s no embers – if you put a hot butt in a box that goes into a UPS truck, that could end poorly,” Blum said. “We have an outside shelter where these buckets and butts go and they get stirred. We have two facility associates in charge of collecting and monitoring them. Basically we collect enough that in two months we send three or four, sometime five boxes of them off.” For every cigarette butt DYNA-MIG ships off to be recycled, the company receives a certain number of points through the TerraCycle cigarette butt program. When exchanged, those points equate to one one-hundredth of a cent for every cigarette butt collected, all of which is earmarked for a charity of the company’s choice. So far, DYNA-MIG’s efforts have raised $454, $230 of which was used to build 92 bee homes in an area of Toronto known as Evergreen Brickworks. Evergreen is a national charity that makes cities more liveable by helping Canadians create and sustain dynamic outdoor spaces in schools, communities and homes. “TerraCycle had a bunch of suggestions in a news bulletin and I was reading through it and thought Evergreen’s Bee Program looked pretty good. I presented it to our green team that we have here and said I would like us to use our points for this because the bee disease that’s been going around (colony collapse disorder) is a big problem. If they can’t pollinate from flower to flower, from tree to tree, we’re going to lose our fruits and vegetables,” Blum said, adding that apiarists working with Evergreen monitor the bee homes built in Toronto to try and understand what causes colony collapse disorder, while also maintaining the ability to isolate any hives that come down with the disease to prevent it from spreading. After only a year of participation in TerraCycle’s Cigarette Butt Waste Recycling program, DYNA-MIG was presented with a Good Idea Award for its efforts at its parent company, F-Tech Inc.’s 2014 environmental conference in Japan. Because of its success in Stratford, F-Tech is now looking at implementing the program at each of DYNA-MIG’s sister companies worldwide. For more information on how to reduce local landfill waste through TerraCycle’s recycling programs, visit www.terracycle.ca.