Spring is our most honest season and the sidewalk glaciers that are rapidly receding are the most honest brokers around.   They contain the truth of Toronto and right now the truth is butts. Endless butts. As if preserved in amber, the great spring melt is revealing thousands of cigarette butts on our streets in great piles and in long toxic carpets that will wash into the lakes and rivers if not swept up soon.   Spring is our most honest season and the sidewalk glaciers that are rapidly receding are the most honest brokers around.   They contain the truth of Toronto and right now the truth is butts. Endless butts. As if preserved in amber, the great spring melt is revealing thousands of cigarette butts on our streets in great piles and in long toxic carpets that will wash into the lakes and rivers if not swept up soon.   A collection of cigarette butts trapped in sidewalk glaciers.  (SHAWN MICALLEF / FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   There’s more than just butts though; the glaciers provide an opportunity for urban archeology of the recent past. Along just one block of College St., the glaciers revealed a baked potato, a giant screw, a notebook, water bottles, clothing, shoes, and an entire Christmas tree that had been, until recently, completely buried.   There are also bikes that were caught in one of the recent blizzards. The lack of snow clearing, coupled with a few warm days, where the snow drifts turned to slush before freezing again, caused bikes parked along the sidewalks to become trapped like woolly mammoths in ice, impossible to move without a pick axe and a lot of muscle.   So there most stayed, not necessarily abandoned, just immobile. They’ll loosen up just as coats and scarves are in this fleeting transition time, when solid ground becomes mud for a few weeks as Toronto goes through its brown period before bits of green appear. Still, like Newfoundland icebergs in July, some of the most resilient sidewalk glaciers will linger on our streets for a while yet.   Pay attention to them as you pass through the city and their unusual beauty may grow on you. They are, of course, filthy, but grit-filled ice, some of it as black as asphalt or charcoal, makes for an exquisite material for accidental sculptures.   They melt and hollow out in strange ways and shapes, creating new dirty ice stalagmites during subsequent freeze-thaw cycles, the worst popsicles you could ever taste.   It’s not often we get to watch something disintegrate on the street. Along some streets that weren’t properly cleared, block-long glaciers lay in the gutter, nearly indistinguishable from the road surface. As they too shrink, tiny rivers of melt water will form mini ravines in them, like how Toronto itself was formed over time.   Like or loath winter, proper snow clearing or not, this time of year reveals how poorly we treat the public realm. Or at least how some of us do. It’s almost boring to write about this and it seems futile: litterbugs are eternal. And yet, it’s such an upsetting thing to witness, in action or in aftermath, it always demands push back.   A bicycle frozen in sidewalk ice.  (FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   As a responsible dog owner who sometimes searches for wayward turds on night walks with my iPhone flashlight, the amount of thawing poop in public places right now is distressing too. Who are these people who don’t stoop and scoop? You shame the rest of us. Worse, you shame your canine, an innocent who just needed to go and hoped you’d do the right thing.   Some of it is even bagged. The bagged poop, left out, is a subset of this genre that is most confounding: bag it only to leave it in a snow bank? Why the half measure? This phenomenon happens on hiking trails too: people will bag it then leave it at the trailhead.   As for the cigarette butts, they seem to be the last socially acceptable form of litter. Tolerated, at least. The quick flick of a thumb and finger, a flash of embers, it’s satisfying, I get it. For a brief couple years in the 1990s I smoked. The old, prone to breaking down, Pontiac Sunbird I drove had a lighter and built-in ashtray, but I flicked every butt out the window without a thought. Now that seems reprehensible, but that at the time was normal. Everyone did it.   While butts can be consistently found nearly everywhere, they tend to cluster in front of cafes and bars, the kinds of social spaces where people go outside for a smoke, then flick them a few metres away without thinking. If you stare at just the gutters, you’ll know you’re passing such an establishment without looking up because of all the butts.   Four years ago, a pilot project was started though a partnership between the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the West Queen West Business Improvement Area, Councillor Mike Layton’s office and a recycling company called TerraCycle. Boxes that smokers could butt out in were installed on poles and businesses emptied them and sent the butts away for recycling. The responsibility was shared, though smokers bear the most. We need more of this.   Spring cleaning, if we still go in for that sort of thing in this low tax city, will return Toronto to its usual state of cleanliness, which isn’t what it once was. That’s a choice we’ve collectively decided to make.   Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef     A collection of cigarette butts trapped in sidewalk glaciers.  (SHAWN MICALLEF / FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   There’s more than just butts though; the glaciers provide an opportunity for urban archeology of the recent past. Along just one block of College St., the glaciers revealed a baked potato, a giant screw, a notebook, water bottles, clothing, shoes, and an entire Christmas tree that had been, until recently, completely buried.   There are also bikes that were caught in one of the recent blizzards. The lack of snow clearing, coupled with a few warm days, where the snow drifts turned to slush before freezing again, caused bikes parked along the sidewalks to become trapped like woolly mammoths in ice, impossible to move without a pick axe and a lot of muscle.   So there most stayed, not necessarily abandoned, just immobile. They’ll loosen up just as coats and scarves are in this fleeting transition time, when solid ground becomes mud for a few weeks as Toronto goes through its brown period before bits of green appear. Still, like Newfoundland icebergs in July, some of the most resilient sidewalk glaciers will linger on our streets for a while yet.   Pay attention to them as you pass through the city and their unusual beauty may grow on you. They are, of course, filthy, but grit-filled ice, some of it as black as asphalt or charcoal, makes for an exquisite material for accidental sculptures.   They melt and hollow out in strange ways and shapes, creating new dirty ice stalagmites during subsequent freeze-thaw cycles, the worst popsicles you could ever taste.   It’s not often we get to watch something disintegrate on the street. Along some streets that weren’t properly cleared, block-long glaciers lay in the gutter, nearly indistinguishable from the road surface. As they too shrink, tiny rivers of melt water will form mini ravines in them, like how Toronto itself was formed over time.   Like or loath winter, proper snow clearing or not, this time of year reveals how poorly we treat the public realm. Or at least how some of us do. It’s almost boring to write about this and it seems futile: litterbugs are eternal. And yet, it’s such an upsetting thing to witness, in action or in aftermath, it always demands push back.     A bicycle frozen in sidewalk ice.  (FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   As a responsible dog owner who sometimes searches for wayward turds on night walks with my iPhone flashlight, the amount of thawing poop in public places right now is distressing too. Who are these people who don’t stoop and scoop? You shame the rest of us. Worse, you shame your canine, an innocent who just needed to go and hoped you’d do the right thing.   Some of it is even bagged. The bagged poop, left out, is a subset of this genre that is most confounding: bag it only to leave it in a snow bank? Why the half measure? This phenomenon happens on hiking trails too: people will bag it then leave it at the trailhead.   As for the cigarette butts, they seem to be the last socially acceptable form of litter. Tolerated, at least. The quick flick of a thumb and finger, a flash of embers, it’s satisfying, I get it. For a brief couple years in the 1990s I smoked. The old, prone to breaking down, Pontiac Sunbird I drove had a lighter and built-in ashtray, but I flicked every butt out the window without a thought. Now that seems reprehensible, but that at the time was normal. Everyone did it.   While butts can be consistently found nearly everywhere, they tend to cluster in front of cafes and bars, the kinds of social spaces where people go outside for a smoke, then flick them a few metres away without thinking. If you stare at just the gutters, you’ll know you’re passing such an establishment without looking up because of all the butts.   Four years ago, a pilot project was started though a partnership between the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the West Queen West Business Improvement Area, Councillor Mike Layton’s office and a recycling company called TerraCycle. Boxes that smokers could butt out in were installed on poles and businesses emptied them and sent the butts away for recycling. The responsibility was shared, though smokers bear the most. We need more of this.   Spring cleaning, if we still go in for that sort of thing in this low tax city, will return Toronto to its usual state of cleanliness, which isn’t what it once was. That’s a choice we’ve collectively decided to make.   Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef  

 

  It all began with six streets in downtown Gainesville. In two days, Keep Alachua County Beautiful staff and volunteers collected almost 700 cigarette butts. The organization started the cigarette litter prevention program in 2006. Still, cigarette litter remains a problem. Every year, volunteers scan the same streets and collect cigarette butts. Usually, they weigh the trash they collect, but because cigarette butts are so light, there’s no point. “Their weight has little importance on their effect,” says Gina Hawkins, the executive director of Keep Alachua County Beautiful. Hawkins said there was a 64 percent decrease in cigarette litter six years ago. That was one year after she entered her position. Despite the improvement, Hawkins said the decreases had diminished over the years, and something more had to be done. In order to combat the issue, the group created a new method within the program. Maia Crook, its grant coordinator, is one of the few people who helped start the new method within the cigarette litter prevention program. It began in January when Keep Alachua County Beautiful started partnering with local businesses to help reduce litter by limiting cigarette butts. According to Crook, the new goal of the program is to target businesses that smokers often frequent, like bars or restaurants. Here’s how they do it: Every week, the group will send out volunteers to pick up buckets they provided to local businesses. They empty them and bring them back to headquarters. When all of the buckets are emptied, the group sends the cigarette butts to a company called Terracycle. From there, the litter gets melted into plastic to make new products. Ash and tobacco are separated and composted. Crook said the program is applying for a grant because it wants to expand to other businesses in Gainesville. “Sometimes businesses want to participate but they are too far away to send someone to pick up their cigarette litter,” Crook said.  

  The grant will also be used to purchase more portable/pocket ashtrays, according to Crook. She said this is a quicker way to encourage smokers to dispose of their cigarette waste properly. Currently, funds are used to buy disposal receptacles that Keep Alachua County Beautiful places in front of businesses with heavy traffic. Hawkins said they range in price because of where they go. They can cost as little as $35 and as much as $175. Some are large and have to be screwed into the ground, while others are small and attach to a wall. “We’re trying to encourage people to do more,” Hawkins said. And they are. DeLynn Salafrio, owner of Agricultural Permitting Services LLC, 60, received a degree in geology from the University of Florida but said she’s been passionate about conservation work and marine life for as long as she can remember. She’s owned the company for 25 years. A few years ago, Salafrio said she and a friend worked together to make cards to distribute within the community. On the front is a picture of a turtle that Salafrio painted herself. The back features a brief excerpt about Salafrio and her reasoning behind creating the card. It also lists seven facts about cigarette litter. Salafrio said she found out about Keep Alachua County Beautiful’s program and wanted to help. She partnered with the group and now helps by passing out cards and pocket ashtrays in Gainesville and elsewhere. “It’s been exciting and fun because this is my dream,” Salafrio said. “To stop cigarette litter and educate people one person at a time.” She’s even gone as far as creating her own Facebook group called the Mermaid Effect in February. Salafrio said the group organizes cleanups in places like Hunter Springs and Crystal River. For Valentine’s Day, they passed out candy with cards. According to Salafrio, if someone feels special, they’ll listen. When trying to convince someone to stop littering or speak out if they see it, it’s better to be nice about it than to berate them. Just recently, Salafrio said she visited Chassahowitzka in Citrus County to pass out her cards. People told her of a local man who throws about two packs of cigarette butts off his porch every day. They made unpleasant comments about him, and when Salafrio confronted the man she was moved. Since then, Salafrio plans to make a personalized clay pot for him so he can throw away his cigarette butts properly. She also plans to create fun and eye-catching smoking receptacles to encourage people to dispose of cigarette waste in the right place. “The receptacles we have now, they’re ugly and you can’t see them,” Salafrio said. “Or there aren’t any at all and that’s the problem.” The following businesses are participating in Keep Alachua County Beautiful’s program:

• Dragonfly Sushi
• Gainesville House of Beer
• Gators Dockside
• High Dive
• Lillian’s
• Loosey’s, Downtown
• Main Street Bar & Billiards
• Original American Kitchen
• Steamers Downtown
• Havana’s Wine & Cigar Lounge
• Boca Fiesta/Palomino

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.

Spring is our most honest season and the sidewalk glaciers that are rapidly receding are the most honest brokers around.   They contain the truth of Toronto and right now the truth is butts. Endless butts. As if preserved in amber, the great spring melt is revealing thousands of cigarette butts on our streets in great piles and in long toxic carpets that will wash into the lakes and rivers if not swept up soon.     A collection of cigarette butts trapped in sidewalk glaciers.  (SHAWN MICALLEF / FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   There’s more than just butts though; the glaciers provide an opportunity for urban archeology of the recent past. Along just one block of College St., the glaciers revealed a baked potato, a giant screw, a notebook, water bottles, clothing, shoes, and an entire Christmas tree that had been, until recently, completely buried.   There are also bikes that were caught in one of the recent blizzards. The lack of snow clearing, coupled with a few warm days, where the snow drifts turned to slush before freezing again, caused bikes parked along the sidewalks to become trapped like woolly mammoths in ice, impossible to move without a pick axe and a lot of muscle.   So there most stayed, not necessarily abandoned, just immobile. They’ll loosen up just as coats and scarves are in this fleeting transition time, when solid ground becomes mud for a few weeks as Toronto goes through its brown period before bits of green appear. Still, like Newfoundland icebergs in July, some of the most resilient sidewalk glaciers will linger on our streets for a while yet.   Pay attention to them as you pass through the city and their unusual beauty may grow on you. They are, of course, filthy, but grit-filled ice, some of it as black as asphalt or charcoal, makes for an exquisite material for accidental sculptures.   They melt and hollow out in strange ways and shapes, creating new dirty ice stalagmites during subsequent freeze-thaw cycles, the worst popsicles you could ever taste.   It’s not often we get to watch something disintegrate on the street. Along some streets that weren’t properly cleared, block-long glaciers lay in the gutter, nearly indistinguishable from the road surface. As they too shrink, tiny rivers of melt water will form mini ravines in them, like how Toronto itself was formed over time.   Like or loath winter, proper snow clearing or not, this time of year reveals how poorly we treat the public realm. Or at least how some of us do. It’s almost boring to write about this and it seems futile: litterbugs are eternal. And yet, it’s such an upsetting thing to witness, in action or in aftermath, it always demands push back.   A bicycle frozen in sidewalk ice.  (FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   As a responsible dog owner who sometimes searches for wayward turds on night walks with my iPhone flashlight, the amount of thawing poop in public places right now is distressing too. Who are these people who don’t stoop and scoop? You shame the rest of us. Worse, you shame your canine, an innocent who just needed to go and hoped you’d do the right thing.   Some of it is even bagged. The bagged poop, left out, is a subset of this genre that is most confounding: bag it only to leave it in a snow bank? Why the half measure? This phenomenon happens on hiking trails too: people will bag it then leave it at the trailhead.   As for the cigarette butts, they seem to be the last socially acceptable form of litter. Tolerated, at least. The quick flick of a thumb and finger, a flash of embers, it’s satisfying, I get it. For a brief couple years in the 1990s I smoked. The old, prone to breaking down, Pontiac Sunbird I drove had a lighter and built-in ashtray, but I flicked every butt out the window without a thought. Now that seems reprehensible, but that at the time was normal. Everyone did it.   While butts can be consistently found nearly everywhere, they tend to cluster in front of cafes and bars, the kinds of social spaces where people go outside for a smoke, then flick them a few metres away without thinking. If you stare at just the gutters, you’ll know you’re passing such an establishment without looking up because of all the butts.   Four years ago, a pilot project was started though a partnership between the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the West Queen West Business Improvement Area, Councillor Mike Layton’s office and a recycling company called TerraCycle. Boxes that smokers could butt out in were installed on poles and businesses emptied them and sent the butts away for recycling. The responsibility was shared, though smokers bear the most. We need more of this.   Spring cleaning, if we still go in for that sort of thing in this low tax city, will return Toronto to its usual state of cleanliness, which isn’t what it once was. That’s a choice we’ve collectively decided to make.   Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef  

Spring is our most honest season and the sidewalk glaciers that are rapidly receding are the most honest brokers around.   They contain the truth of Toronto and right now the truth is butts. Endless butts. As if preserved in amber, the great spring melt is revealing thousands of cigarette butts on our streets in great piles and in long toxic carpets that will wash into the lakes and rivers if not swept up soon.     A collection of cigarette butts trapped in sidewalk glaciers.  (SHAWN MICALLEF / FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   There’s more than just butts though; the glaciers provide an opportunity for urban archeology of the recent past. Along just one block of College St., the glaciers revealed a baked potato, a giant screw, a notebook, water bottles, clothing, shoes, and an entire Christmas tree that had been, until recently, completely buried.   There are also bikes that were caught in one of the recent blizzards. The lack of snow clearing, coupled with a few warm days, where the snow drifts turned to slush before freezing again, caused bikes parked along the sidewalks to become trapped like woolly mammoths in ice, impossible to move without a pick axe and a lot of muscle.   So there most stayed, not necessarily abandoned, just immobile. They’ll loosen up just as coats and scarves are in this fleeting transition time, when solid ground becomes mud for a few weeks as Toronto goes through its brown period before bits of green appear. Still, like Newfoundland icebergs in July, some of the most resilient sidewalk glaciers will linger on our streets for a while yet.   Pay attention to them as you pass through the city and their unusual beauty may grow on you. They are, of course, filthy, but grit-filled ice, some of it as black as asphalt or charcoal, makes for an exquisite material for accidental sculptures.   They melt and hollow out in strange ways and shapes, creating new dirty ice stalagmites during subsequent freeze-thaw cycles, the worst popsicles you could ever taste.   It’s not often we get to watch something disintegrate on the street. Along some streets that weren’t properly cleared, block-long glaciers lay in the gutter, nearly indistinguishable from the road surface. As they too shrink, tiny rivers of melt water will form mini ravines in them, like how Toronto itself was formed over time.   Like or loath winter, proper snow clearing or not, this time of year reveals how poorly we treat the public realm. Or at least how some of us do. It’s almost boring to write about this and it seems futile: litterbugs are eternal. And yet, it’s such an upsetting thing to witness, in action or in aftermath, it always demands push back.     A bicycle frozen in sidewalk ice.  (FOR THE TORONTO STAR)   As a responsible dog owner who sometimes searches for wayward turds on night walks with my iPhone flashlight, the amount of thawing poop in public places right now is distressing too. Who are these people who don’t stoop and scoop? You shame the rest of us. Worse, you shame your canine, an innocent who just needed to go and hoped you’d do the right thing.   Some of it is even bagged. The bagged poop, left out, is a subset of this genre that is most confounding: bag it only to leave it in a snow bank? Why the half measure? This phenomenon happens on hiking trails too: people will bag it then leave it at the trailhead.   As for the cigarette butts, they seem to be the last socially acceptable form of litter. Tolerated, at least. The quick flick of a thumb and finger, a flash of embers, it’s satisfying, I get it. For a brief couple years in the 1990s I smoked. The old, prone to breaking down, Pontiac Sunbird I drove had a lighter and built-in ashtray, but I flicked every butt out the window without a thought. Now that seems reprehensible, but that at the time was normal. Everyone did it.   While butts can be consistently found nearly everywhere, they tend to cluster in front of cafes and bars, the kinds of social spaces where people go outside for a smoke, then flick them a few metres away without thinking. If you stare at just the gutters, you’ll know you’re passing such an establishment without looking up because of all the butts.   Four years ago, a pilot project was started though a partnership between the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the West Queen West Business Improvement Area, Councillor Mike Layton’s office and a recycling company called TerraCycle. Boxes that smokers could butt out in were installed on poles and businesses emptied them and sent the butts away for recycling. The responsibility was shared, though smokers bear the most. We need more of this.   Spring cleaning, if we still go in for that sort of thing in this low tax city, will return Toronto to its usual state of cleanliness, which isn’t what it once was. That’s a choice we’ve collectively decided to make.   Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef  

Students at George Rogers Clark High School and Phoenix Academy spent a portion of their days earlier this week picking up cigarette butts, Juul pods and dip cans spread around their campuses. The effort was part of the Clark County Health Department’s annual celebration of National Kick Butts Day, which is Wednesday. It is a national day of activism that empowers youth to “stand out, speak up and seize control against big tobacco,” Angela Bereznak, health educator at the Clark County Health Department, said. Students collected several bags of littered tobacco products on the tobacco-free campuses, including Campbell Junior High School. The Beta Club and GRC Media Specialist Connie Cobb helped coordinate the pick up at GRC. By getting involved in Kick Butts Day and other activities, Bereznak said, America’s youth can raise awareness about the tobacco problem, encourage peers to be tobacco-free and support practical solutions to reduce tobacco use. Bereznak said the health department hopes to expand this event to other schools in 2020. Erin Sliney, an AmeriCorps service volunteer, serving Clark County through AmeriCorps’ Environmental Education Leadership Corps (EELCorps) at the Greater Clark Foundation, said cigarettes are the most littered item in the world. About 38 percent of all litter is cigarette butts, and they are hard — and gross — to pick up, she said in an email. “Most of these littered cigarette butts end up in our waterways,” Sliney said. “When cigarette butts get wet they leach chemicals in the water that are harmful to fish and other wildlife.” Many people also don’t realize most cigarette filters are plastic. “When you throw your cigarette butts out the window, you’re essentially scattering small pieces of plastic into the environment,” Sliney said. Water and sun break down the cigarettes over time, but while they appear to “go away,” the plastic becomes smaller and smaller pieces that are nearly impossible to remove from the ecosystem. People have found plastic in the stomachs of hundreds of species of wildlife, including ones that live in the deepest ocean trenches, Sliney said. E-cigarettes are not a greener alternative to cigarettes, Sliney said, even though some companies have “misleadingly marketed” them this way. “Although there is little research on the environmental impacts of e-cigarette manufacturing, we do know that most e-cigarettes are discarded in a matter of weeks and are made from non-biodegradable plastics and metals,” Sliney said. Two components of e-cigarettes classify as hazardous waste: nicotine and lithium-ion batteries. Nicotine is also a poison that can pollute waterways and harm humans and wildlife who are accidentally exposed. Lithium ion batteries can explode and are one of the leading causes of recycling and garbage truck and facility fires, Sliney said. “On Kick Butts Day, we urge you to try to stop using tobacco products for your own health, but for the health of the environment,” Sliney said. Some alternatives to littering include: — Throw cigarette butts away — Keep an ashtray in the car or carry a small tin to store butts while out — Reuse e-cigarettes when possible. Users can send used e-cigarettes to companies, like TerraCycle and Green Smoke, who recycle them. — Don’t throw lithium-ion batteries away. Instead, take them to appropriate electronic recycling locations.

TerraCycle, the world’s leader in the collection and repurposing of complex waste streams, has joined forces with Go Green Middleburg to collect and recycle cigarette butts throughout the city’s districts. “Go Green started cigarette recycling after volunteers got tired of picking up hundreds of cigarette butts from streets, sidewalks, bushes, parking lots and storm drains year-after-year during the Town’s semi-annual cleanup events,” said Middleburg Go Green Committee member Lynne Kaye. “A little research showed that not only were the cigarette butts a pain for volunteers to collect, the cigarette waste also posed a hazard to the Town’s children, pets, wildlife and water quality.” Through this program, Go Green Middleburg is not only addressing the nation’s most commonly littered item but also a form of unbiodegradable plastic waste. Since implementing the program, cigarette collection receptacles have been attached trash cans all-around town. Exceptionally high-trafficked street-corners, benches and parking lots were also identified for receptacle placement during town-wide clean-ups. The organization currently maintains 13 receptacles in public areas which is a significant amount considering Middleburg’s smaller size. All of the collected waste is shipped to TerraCycle for recycling. When processed, the paper and tobacco is separated from the filter and composted. The filter is recycled into plastic pellets which can be used by manufacturers to make a number of products such as shipping pallets, ashtrays and park benches. “These receptacles will help keep Middleburg free of one of the most littered items on the planet,” said Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of TerraCycle. “With this program, Go Green Middleburg is taking a step to reduce the amount of trash going to landfill while also preserving the area’s natural beauty.” TerraCycle has collected hundreds of millions of cigarette butts globally. Additionally, through its various recycling programs, it has engaged over 100 million people across 21 countries to collect and recycle more than four billion pieces of waste that were otherwise non-recyclable.

An online “unveiling” recently of a Ventura beach bench made from recycled cigarette butts quickly generated more than 153 social media shares and dozens of comments on the Ventura Parks and Recreation Division Facebook page. Plenty of web surfers took the obvious opportunity to crack punny jokes. Most were along the line of the official name given to the cigarette butt collection and recycling program organized by the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, “Hold on to Your Butt.” The city and the nonprofit have purchased and installed 103 metal containers in areas where cigarette butt litter was common, despite a city ordinance banning smoking in public areas. Volunteers empty approximately 4,000 butts per month from these receptacles. Combined with the butts they collect from beach cleanup events, they have collected more than 270,000 butts in a little over two years, according to Juli Marciel, Surfrider’s coordinator for the program. Volunteers put these collected butts into boxes with postage-paid labels supplied by Terracycle, a company recycling a wide variety of products. Recycling by mail is too expensive to be viable for nearly any material, but in the case of cigarettes, the program is made possible through sponsorship by a product manufacturer. In fact, the sponsorship funds are sufficient not just to pay for the free mailers, but also to donate a dollar per pound of collected cigarettes to Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit focused on litter prevention and cleanup. Surfrider also obtains sponsorships noted on these containers, helping fund the cost of the containers. Some who comment on the sponsored recycling program see corporate responsibility, and others see “green washing” focused on improving perceptions of a product through the misleading appearance of eco-friendliness. Lars Davenport, environmental specialist with the city of Ventura, points out a major benefit of the containers and the bench. “Cigarette butts tend to be disposed wherever a cigarette is finished,” he said, noting the crucial role of convenience in preventing litter, “and some people seem to think their cigarette litter is not significant” because some of it is biodegradable. A bench made from butts drives home a message about the ubiquity of butts and their plastic content. MORE: Try using Ventura County's sunshine to get your clothes dry Indeed, Brian Hanck, a spokesperson for Terracycle, noted in an email, “We can put about 20% ... cellulose acetate (plastic from cigarette butts) … into a bench, and the benches are about 80 pounds, so we would estimate that 15,000 cigarette butts go into one park bench.” Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter, according to the Keep America Beautiful website, which notes that putting them in planters and disposing of them in waterways is also litter; butts often wash out and end up on shores. Terracycle also provides sponsor-subsidized mail-in recycling programs for other products, ranging from Burt’s Bees lip care products to Solo cups. Additionally, Terracycle has many non-sponsored programs, some of which seem designed to attract sponsors. For example, for $102, you can purchase a small shipping box (11 inches by 11 inches by 20 inches) and a postage-paid return shipping label to send Terracycle your used chewing gum. According to Brian Hanck, the Terracycle spokesman: “Chewing gum is made from polymers which are synthetic plastics that do not biodegrade. The … gum is sanitized and blended, then converted into plastic pellets. These specific plastic pellets are usually used in creating new products made of rubber or plastic.” Among other items, the company also has mail-in recycling programs for coffee capsules, pens, plastic gloves, detergent booster pouches, ready-made pasta bags, contact lenses and the blister packs containing the lenses. Terracycle previously had sponsor funding for a program to recycle mixed plastics from beach clean-ups, but its website indicates the program is no longer “accepting new partners” for that program.