On having purpose: "Our entire drive is going good, saving the world and helping the environment." Tom Szaky founder and CEO of TerraCycle is interviewed by David Cogan managing partner and founder of Eliances and host of the Eliances Heroes show broadcast on am and fm, syndicated online.

Hey volunteers! This is a quick note to thank you for all of the cigarette butts you’ve collected during our beach cleanups and habitat restoration events and turned in. We just mailed another 3000+ to TerraCycle. Since Helen started collecting them in 2013/2014 we’ve recycled 323,712 filters to date keeping them from the landfill! Isn’t this astonishing?

A few years ago, Marsha Borden favored high quality, organic skeins of wool to create things like knitted hats, mittens, and scarves for her beloved children. Then, one day, she looked at the pile of colorful plastic bags growing in the kitchen of her Guilford home. “I thought, hmmmm, what can I do with these plastic bags? I really kind of became captivated. Maybe I didn’t need to buy expensive new materials like organic cotton to make them. Could I use stuff I already had?” says Borden. Since then she has used those plastic bags to make a skirt, a bustier, handbags, Christmas ornaments, an entire tea set including a tablecloth, and several other works of art that have been shown in art gallery exhibitions next to work by artists with national and international reputations. Borden, in fact, credits her obsession with transforming these plastic bags as being key to her transformation from a mom who makes mittens to a mom who makes mittens and is also an artist and budding activist.

Want to be more mindful while you're cleaning? You've probably got a good handle on the items you can toss into your recycling bins—paper, plastics, glass, aluminum, etc.—but there are also a lot of specialty programs that allow you to recycle other household items to reduce waste and even help people in need. And if you compost (or if you're thinking about starting) it might surprise you to know that you can add more to your compost pile than just food scraps, coffee grounds and leaves.

Locals are invited to attend a free, open event to keep cigarette waste off the street and out of landfills at Preston's Colfax Clean Butt Crawl August 19 at 5 p.m. A community cleanup and birthday celebration in one, participants will meet at Prohibition (http://www.prohibitiondenver.com) and split into teams to gather as many cigarette butts as possible; the team with the greatest amount of cigarette butts will be rewarded with a prize. All cigarette butts collected will be recycled through TerraCycle’s free Cigarette Waste Recycling Program. “The purposeof this event is to encourage others to prioritize keeping Colfax Avenue clean,”said Preston Murray, Preston's Colfax Clean Butt Crawl organizer.  “I have planned it around my birthday to leverage the people who care about me to care about donating their time to benefit Colfax and the cleanliness of our city in an effort to clean as much of the neighborhood in which I work and live around the occasion of my next year of life.”

Eight cigarette buttlers are now installed downtown, with 12 more coming, in an attempt to keep the city clean and lessen pollution runoff into the ocean. The Gloucester Clean City Commission received a $2,500 Cigarette Litter Prevention Program grant from Keep America Beautiful in March and used the money to buy 20 buttlers. Commissioners Ainsley Smith, Nick Iliades, Beverly Low and Eric Magers installing seven buttlers on Main Street themselves Wednesday evening.. "Its' a pretty easy process," Smith said. "For the most part we put them up there with simple hand tools and they're sturdy so we're feeling good about that."

Plastic bottles, discarded chairs, lone flip flops, food wrappers and cigarette butts — these are the type of items that volunteers picked up from 5.6 miles of Lake Tahoe beaches on July 5 following the busy holiday weekend. The final tally was 1,676 pounds of litter. More than 320 volunteers joined the League to Save Lake Tahoe for the annual Keep Tahoe Red, White and Blue cleanups that look place around the lake at Commons Beach, Kings Beach, Kiva Beach, Nevada Beach and Regan Beach. "Over the weekend, Lake Tahoe hit its high water mark for the first time in years, leaving many of Tahoe's beaches partly or fully underwater," said Marilee Movius, the League's community engagement manager. "With July Fourth celebrations crowded onto the remaining patches of dry ground, our volunteers collected litter that could have been harmful to wildlife and Lake Tahoe's water quality."

What happens to a cigarette butt when you snub it out? The City of Fort Saskatchewan is in the beginning stages of a unique recyling program that recycles cigarette butts into such useable products as park benches. “How the program works is when our staff are emptying the city owned receptacles they keep them in a separate container from the garbage,” explained the city’s manager of Parks Services, Jean Dabels. “When we have the required quantity for shipping we contact TerraCycle and they send us a pre-paid shipping container. We ship the container to them and they recycle them into park benches, etc.” The program is of no cost to the city and it was brought to Parks department’s attention by a staff member in the transportation department.

WILMINGTON -- According to keep America beautiful, cigarette butts are the most littered item worldwide. That's why the City of Wilmington says it's partnered with Keep New Hanover Beautiful to recycle cigarette butts. The city has installed 110 new cigarette-butt- disposal canisters. The city collects the discarded butts, and Keep New Hanover Beautiful  volunteers mail them to Terracycle, a free waste-collection and recycling facility.