The DVBIA collected 52lbs of cigarette butts in only one month to show the impact that micro-waste makes on downtown cleanliness.   When the Downtown Clean Team collects cigarette butts, they usually dispose of them using Terracycle, a cigarette waste recycling program that recycles the butts into a variety of industrial products and composts any remaining tobacco.   To show the impact that micro-waste has on downtown cleanliness, the Clean Team stored all cigarette butts picked up from the streets of downtown Vancouver, and in only one month, the team collected 52lbs of butts in the DVBIA’s 90-block catchment alone.       On September 19th, the Downtown Vancouver BIA displayed the 52lbs of cigarette butts in a glass container on the North Plaza of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Joined by the City’s cigarette mascot, Ashley, the team handed out pocket ashtrays – small, envelope-style ashtrays that allow smokers to store their butts until they have access to a trash can.   As part of the City’s annual anti-litter campaign, “Put waste in its place”, pocket ashtrays are being distributed for free year-round at several community centres, libraries, and at City Hall campus in an effort to decrease cigarette litter. The City’s pocket ashtrays were introduced in June and handed out throughout the summer in an effort to help reduce the number of cigarette butts littered on the streets of Vancouver.

Cigarette butts are getting second (healthier) lives thanks to a pioneering partnership between Tempe golf course Rolling Hills, waste collection and repurposing company TerraCycle and environmentally conscious smoking solution company EZ Products CLS. This year, seven golf carts at Rolling Hills were equipped with cigarette waste receptacles thanks to a grant from Keep America Beautiful, and so far more than 20,000 butts have been shipped to TerraCycle, which turns them into everyday products such as: Park Benches

MONTPELIER, Vt.- A group of volunteers are working to keep the streets of Vermont’s Capitol City litter free piece by piece. “We meet every week, this is the end of our fourth year,” said Anne Ferguson, a founder of Trash Tramps. Equipped with bags and tongs, the group deploy every Tuesday afternoon from the Montpelier Senior Activity Center on Barre Street. “It’s a spiritual practice, you know,” said Ferguson. “It’s caring for the earth” In the beginning, volunteers picked up all the trash they could find. But they quickly realized something was being overlooked: cigarette butts. “You drop your butt on the sidewalk, it’s going to get washed into the storm drain and therefore get in the river,” said Ferguson. Ferguson says the self-proclaimed tramps collect 3,000 to 4,000 butts a week. That’s more than 800,000 butts since the group was formed in 2015. “It’s not because we’re really big smokers here,” she said “It’s because we a system in place to collect them.” The group brings the butts to the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District. “We ship them to TerraCycle which than coordinates the recycling of those items,” said Brenna Toman. When processed, the paper and tobacco is separated from the filter and composted while the filter is recycled into plastic pellets. “They’re used for plastic pallets for industrial uses but also for plastic park benches and outdoor furniture,” said Toman. CVSWMD has helped the secure grants for the tramps to help support their efforts. There have been several sidewalk buttlers installed around the city which collect thousands of butts every year.

(FOX 2) - When a staff member approached Christopher Jacobs about recycling cigarette butts, he thought it was a dig at him. After all, the executive director of Ypsilanti’s Downtown Development Authority counts himself among the few that still partake. Instead, the supposed tongue-in-cheek comment was actually a recommendation that Jacobs thought fit the city’s progressive culture rather well. “We brought it before the board in August, reached out to businesses - almost all of the bars and restaurants said they struggle with cleaning up butts in front of their stores,” Jacobs said. “People seemed to be excited, so we said ‘let’s pilot the program’.” That program involves placing 12 recycling containers intended for cigarette butts at highly trafficked areas around the city. The simple gesture is good optics for the city, but it also represents a burgeoning trend among cities to engage best practices for business and environment. “I think we may be one of the first communities,” he said. “I don’t see it in many of the other communities. To divert that material from landfills and to produce something good from a bad habit - we really didn’t need to talk about it much (at city council). Everyone said ‘wow, that’s a great idea. It’s really cheap. It’s low-hanging fruit’.” As governments enact more restrictions on single-use plastics, environmentalists have turned their heads toward cigarette butts. The orange piece of paper and plastic might be minuscule, but the numbers behind them certainly aren’t. The Cigarette Butt Pollution Project reports that every year, 376 billion cigarettes are consumed in the U.S. alone. Worldwide, that number climbs into the trillions. Now imagine 65 percent of those cigarette butts getting tossed on streets, in rivers and every other crack of pavement they it can fit in. More than just an eyesore, those butts don’t biodegrade. They’re made of a polymer. As the waste has spread, the cigarette butt has been dubbed the “The most littered item in the world.” And with that acknowledgement comes a surging campaign to recycle the waste. “I love our mission, it’s the whole mission-driven eliminate-the-idea-of-waste goal,” said Lisa Pellegrino, the strategic partnerships manager and consumer engagement with TerraCycle. “It’s an anti-littering message that focuses on the toxic nature of waste.” TerraCycle isn't one of the new kids on the recycling block - but it's message of eliminating “the idea of waste,” rather than just the waste itself may be. The symbolic charge they hope generates material progress comes through in their cigarette butt campaign. They are focusing on the positive reinforcement of recycling cigarette butts, rather than using negative messages meant to shame smokers who discard their waste. Pellegrino said they have seen a reduction of nine to 12 percent of litter in the vicinity of their recycling containers. From there, the butts are processed or ‘pelletized’ and refit for other plastic products like ashtrays and shipping pallets. For Detroit and Grand Rapids, two Michigan cities that have used TerraCycle’s services, they have collected 60,750 and 1,219,728 butts respectively. But, officials remain skeptical to their effectiveness. “It all depends on whether people use them,” Jacobs said. “With conventional cigarette butt disposals, not everyone snuffs out their butts and puts them in there. Some communities might be skeptical. But with stories like these, TerraCycle might bring on a few more communities.”

- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor     A city councillor remarked at Monday's meeting that the cigarette butt situation in another municipality councillors recently visited is far worse than Owen Sound. Presumably the councillor was referring to Ottawa, where councillors attended the AMO (Association of Municipalities of Ontario) annual conference.   Of course this is not surprising as the population of Ottawa is 45 times larger than Owen Sound, and it attracts 11 million visitors a year.   But the comment struck me because the councillor seemed to assume that the recent local concern about cigarette butts is aesthetics.   An attractive downtown is certainly a positive thing. The placement of butt recycling containers in our downtown core is absolutely a laudable step. We look forward to hearing the details of this pilot project – what are the goals, how long will it last and how will we measure success?   But the real worry about cigarette butts is their contamination of our soil, air and water, and the subsequent effect on fish, wildlife and children.   The Owen Sound Waste Watchers have been focussing most of their attention on the river and harbour edges, because those butts do not even go through the storm sewers and interceptors - they blow or wash directly into the bay. Although there are more butts when we hold special events like Harbourfest, Summerfolk, the Salmon Spectacular and the upcoming Riverside Reunion, most of the year the harbour sees plenty of visitors. Strollers, dog walkers, boat launchers, and ship watchers – statistics say 16% percent of those are smokers. We need to keep as many of their cigarette butts as we can out of the water.   Parking lots and gutters are the #1 source of butts – an unintended consequence of removing ashtrays from cars and banning smoking in buildings. Because smoking is also prohibited near entrances of many buildings, butt disposal containers have been removed, or never placed there, to discourage smoking around the door. A Catch-22, for sure.   As research for this piece, more than 500 butts were picked up in less than twenty minutes on the sidewalk and gutter in front of a few of the big stores on Owen Sound's eastern edge. It could have been done much more quickly with a broom and pan, but then the butts could not be sent to Terracycle for recycling.   So the butt of the smoker catching a quick drag to meet their need 'twixt car and destination? Into the gutter (or a planter, or sidewalk) it goes. And from there, after a good rain or stiff breeze, into the storm sewer and then to the bay.   The Waste Watchers have kept the toxins and plastic of over 60,000 cigarette butts out of Owen Sound's water over the past four months. If our smokers smoke at the average Canadian rate, that means a little more than 1.24 days worth of our butts have been recycled so far.   Like most of the complex issues that involve human beings, there are no single, simple solutions to smoking or its by-products. We'll find the variety of approaches needed only by identifying the real priorities, facing them head on and admitting that they need addressing.   Special thanks to those who have inspired our inspirers, and led our leaders.

An organization in Quebec wants to hoard 100,000 cigarette butts around the city, with the goal of protecting the St. Lawrence River from one of the "biggest polluters of our waterways".   For the first time in Quebec City, CMONBAG, which aims to protect marine areas and shorelines, is preparing the initiative "I'm not a beggar ..." which will take place on September 14th.   The organizers invite citizens to clean up the city by picking up cigarette butts thrown to the ground. On the day of the event, four drop-off points will be set up to collect cigarette butts, at the corner of Cartier and René-Lévesque Streets, at D'Youville Square, at Durocher Center and at the corner of 3rd Avenue and Avenue. of the Canardière.  

50 million liters of water

  "We know that a single cigarette butt pollutes up to 500 liters of water, so with our 100,000 butts, we want to protect 50 million liters of water in the river," says the organization's director, Claudette The station.   All cigarette butts will then be donated to Toronto-based TerraCycle, which specializes in recycling, to make lawn chairs, says Légaré.   The twenty or so organizers will also give smokers pocket ashtrays to encourage them to "collaborate in the preservation of the environment".   According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, cigarette butts are at the top of the blacklist of the biggest polluters found near Canadian shores.   Last year, a record number of cigarette butts, 560,432, were collected across Canada's shores.

During the garbage collection supervised by the Carrefour jeunesse-emploi (CJE) in the Matane region during the summer, allowing some twenty young people between the ages of 18 and 29 to harvest 2,358 pounds on the banks. The river and the Matane River, during six chores, a waste particularly discouraged the participants, unable to overcome and surprised by the extent of this invisible pollution: cigarette butts.

"It's a type of garbage they've found everywhere, and they have not been able to fully pick it up, so much so that some of the smokers in the group have begun to reduce their cigarette consumption and think about a way to to pick them up, for example in a pocket ashtray, "said Sylvie Dubé, of the CJE Matane region, in charge of the waste collection activity organized during the summer in collaboration with the Mission 100 tons. The latter, born last year in the province, encourages this kind of chores throughout Quebec, especially to reduce the amount of plastics encountered in the oceans, which could exceed the number of fish by 2050, according to information transmitted by the biologist Lyne Morissette, specialized in the conservation of marine ecosystems. several solutions could be considered. In Europe, for example, states are considering how to push the tobacco industry to cover some of the costs of managing and cleaning up this waste, as well as the costs of raising awareness.   For its part, the City of Montreal has entered into a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specializing in recycling. On the spot, the program Mégot Zéro, defended by the Society for Action, Education and Environmental Awareness of Montreal (SAESEM), consisted in installing several ashtrays recuperators in the public space, attached for example to the electric poles. In the metropolis, 74,000 cigarette butts were collected on May 3, 2019 during a chore.   During the summer, councilor Matane Annie Veillette had recalled that the City was interested in receiving citizen projects as part of its green fund, which could finance for example the installation of cigarette ashtrays in the center. city, to prevent them from ending up in the pipes and the environment.  

YPSILANTI, MI -- Smokers in downtown Ypsilanti will have a new place to dispose of their cigarette butts -- recycling containers. The Ypsilanti Downtown Development Authority is piloting 12 cigarette butt disposal containers throughout the commercial districts in the coming weeks, Director Christopher Jacobs said. The containers created by TerraCycle have a bag within them. When the bag is full, the city will ship it to a warehouse where the company separates the tobacco and paper for composting. The filter and synthetic fiber is cleaned and turned into pellets, which can then be used for a variety of products from shipping pallets to park benches, Jacobs said. Fertilizer created from the compost is not used in food production, TerraCycle spokesperson Alex Payne said. “For example, the fertilizer is commonly utilized for growing large trees that do not produce anything edible,” Payne said. Each disposal container is about $100, Jacobs said. Businesses in the DDA can apply for a container on their private property and the DDA will share the price. “It’s a step beyond and in a progressive place like Ypsi. Smoking is falling out of fashion, but for the few of us that smoke, it’s a great option,” Jacobs said. No timeline has been set for installation, Jacobs said, but the disposal containers will be ordered this week. Downtown Grand Rapids also has TerraCycle recycling containers, according to the company. The city has recycled 1.2 million cigarette butts to date, Payne said.

Cigarette butts are a pervasive problem at marinas, but a new program is helping facilities along the Tennessee River keep the butts out of the water.   Last summer, German scientist Andres Fath spent 34 days swimming the Tennessee River from Knoxville Tennessee to Paducah Kentucky, and with his team collected samples to determine the state of the river. His findings were not good. Three of the 12 samples the team collected found close to 18,000 microplastic particles per cubic meter of water in the Tennessee River. That rate is one of the highest in the world.   With that knowledge the executive director of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful (KTNRB), Kathleen Gibi, decided it was time to tackle the issue of dropped cigarette butts. They often find their way to area waters and are a prime contributor of microplastics, which are found in their filters. Through Keep America Beautiful, Gibi could provide free cigarette disposal receptacles, which became the spark that lit a 5-state movement to keep marinas stocked in these receptacles. Keep America Beautiful is a national non-profit that through national programs and initiatives works to end littering, improve recycling and beautify communities across America.   Gibi happened to talk to Melinda Watson who previously managed the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Tennessee Clean Marina Program and is now program manager for the TVA’s Partnerships and Strategic Planning. Gibi shared that she had the receptacles but wasn’t sure how to spread the word and get them placed. Part of the workplan for TVA is marina education and outreach, so Watson knew from years of visiting marinas that their parking lots and shorelines were often littered with butts. Marinas seemed a good place to distribute the receptacles and with Watson’s history of working with them, she was able to reach out and get marinas onboard with installing the units.   The Program Takes Off Within days, 24 marinas had signed on to take the receptacles. But it wasn’t just the marinas that embraced the idea. To further the education regarding the damaging effects of cigarette waste, TVA provided funding and the Tennessee Department of Transportation provided a special litter grant to have the receptacles wrapped with educational art.   “I had seen art wraps for a history project in Knoxville, and I thought KTNRB could pay to have those done since the receptacles were free. They’d be pretty but would also build awareness of the problems with cigarettes. Our goal isn’t to shame smokers but to shame the littering and help people understand what happens to a butt thrown on the ground,” Gibi said.   Keep Tennessee Beautiful contributed funds to have the receptacles delivered to the participating marinas in Tennessee. According to Gibi the response from marinas has been overwhelming. She anticipates an additional 300 receptacles will be installed with help from a $5,000 Cigarette Litter Prevention Program from Keep America Beautiful. The Jackson County Park Marina in Scottsboro, Alabama, was one of the first marinas to order the receptacles. Within just one week of installation, manager Carl Barns said they are already being used. “I’ve had several people say they liked them. We ordered them to try to keep butts off the ground and from going into the water. We want to have a clean site.” The receptacles are scattered around the property, which accommodates boat slips, a boat ramp, boat rentals and sites for camping as well as cabin rentals.   While Keep America Beautiful will keep providing the free receptacles as long as supplies last, the art wrap takes money, and the art is one of the reasons marinas want the receptacles.   “Now that people see what they look like, marina owners keep following up asking how to get them and then when they will arrive. At first they thought it would just be boxes with some facts and not as pretty as they are. The graphic designer who is making them used to do graphic design for HGTV so the boxes are really nice and people are pleasantly surprised,” Gibi said.   Butt Recycling While the cigarettes are being collected instead of tossed on the ground, there was still the issue of them landing in landfills and contributing to the overall trash problem. However, along with receiving receptacles, participating marinas can ship the waste to TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company that recycles hard-to-recycle materials. TerraCycle partnered with Keep America Beautiful in a nationwide effort to recycle plastic cigarette filters. The company not only does the recycling but Keep America Beautiful provides the shipping packaging and TerraCycle covers the shipping costs.   “We all know that there’s a lot of urgent need to care for our waterways. It’s important to alarm the public to urgent needs but not right to do so without offering solutions. So that’s what we’re working to do. Inspire everyone to care for the river and understand how deeply rooted we are in the water,” Gibi said. Gibi said the river generates $12 billion in economic impact from recreational use alone and provides more impact from the power it generates from dams and from industry that transports products via barges.   The next phase will be to provide the receptacles for boat ramps. Gibi said she thinks the group can produce just 24 units because these units must be larger, standing at 4 feet tall, to accommodate more users. The other factor to consider with the ramps is that there isn’t staff on-site to empty the butts, but Gibi said she’s already been approached by a Power Squadron member who wants to line up volunteers to empty receptacles at boat ramps.   Marinas located within the Tennessee River watershed can request the cigarette waste receptacles by visiting www.KeepTNRiverBeautiful.org/cigarettelitter.