If ripping butts were an arena sporting event, Philly would show up wheezing and take home the title belt every year. We have more cigarette smokers than any of the 10 largest U.S. cities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the good news is there’s now a chance for our tar-lunged populace to do some good for the environment. Litter-prevention organization Keep Philadelphia Beautiful is accepting applications for $5,000 in microgrants that will allow community-organizations to turn discarded cig butts into useful things. Here’s a list of useful things to do with cigarette butts:

The launch of the Great St. Lawrence River Cleanup began on Saturday and kept volunteers and crews very busy, pulling everything from plastic bottles to shopping carts to half of a car out of the river along Cornwall Harbour. “What the divers are doing right now is putting the garbage into piles,” said Karen Cooper, organizer of the cleanup. “They put it all together and then they will hoist it out on July 23.” Cooper said there were about 65 people involved in the cleanup. “Jared (Baker) and his guys pulled out half a car out of the river by themselves,” said Cooper. Cooper said this year they have added recycling to the event.

Rochelle Archibald is the founder and executive director at A Greener Future, an organization that is all about picking up junk for cleaner waterways and lakes.

Rochelle is the quintessential example of somebody who turned her hobby into a business or, in her case, a not-for-profit. Even on trips for work in her previous employment, Rochelle would spend her free time picking up litter and post the cleanup results on social media where she received support and encouragement. Eventually, when her work contract came to an end, Rochelle decided to follow her passion for cleaning up into an not-for-profit adventure instead. Soon enough, A Greener Future gained sponsors and became incorporated, growing well enough to gain cleanup projects in Portugal, Spain, The Bahamas, The United States and, of course, Canada. We’ve also created two flagship events that help define what A Greener Future is all about. We recently ran our third annual Butt Blitz, which is a Canada-wide cigarette butt cleanup. We have volunteer coordinators in cities coast to coast that rally volunteers to pick up butts, counting as they go, and then send them all into TerraCycle to be recycled. This year we picked up a staggering 186,000 cigarette butts and handed out 520 pocket ashtrays! By cleaning up butts already on the ground and raising awareness of the damage they cause we hope that eventually smokers will realize the environmental and health concerns related to cigarette butt litter.

The Butt Blitz of 2017 is underway and downtown businesses are chipping in. The Butt Blitz aims to remove the thousands of cigarette butts that are thrown onto downtown Barrie streets every day by having folks put them in one of the 23 cigarette containers throughout the area. A press conference was organized by the Downtown Barrie BIA Thursday at ZuZu Fashion Boutique. ZuZu owner Tracey Baker was excited to be a part of the campaign to clean up downtown as her shop has been a mainstay for the last two years at 25 Dunlop Street East. Not only a member of the Downtown Barrie BIA, Baker is also very conscience of the environment and wants the city to be a leader in that concern. “This an environmental issue that maybe people don’t think about too often,” said Baker. “4.5 trillion butts are discarded annually on our planet and the majority of those end up in lakes and streams. One cigarette butt in one litre of water can kill one fish. That’s horrifying when you look at the numbers that are polluting the waters, and we are Barrie, we’re known for our beautiful bay.” The campaign was spearheaded by A Greener Future which is a Canadian environmentally-directed non-profit that creates events to help clean up the planet. The Butt Blitz is a nationwide event and Barrie’s leg starts May 6 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. where Baker has asked shop-owners and anyone in downtown to clean up the space around them and put the butts in plastic bags where they’ll be picked up near the end of the day. While the Blitz takes place Saturday, Baker reminds everyone they can start now and keep going always. “The Terracycle receptacles are up and will be emptied periodically from now till forever,” said Baker. “When they’re emptied they are sent to Terracycle where the butts are actually recycled into making shipping pallets. It’s a great way to not just keep the city clean but also the environment. We’ve already seen that it works as we have had three full bags already. Approximately 750 butts per bag multiply that by the 23 containers and we are really making a dent in the waste.” The city of Barrie purchased the 23 containers and the BIA installed them. Tom Ambreau is with the BIA and loves that the city has taken a course of action to help the environment. Ambreau also stresses the other obvious reason to clean up the butts as beautifying the city is important too. “The environmental concern is key here and we have to take care of our future,” said Ambreau. "But another factor is the mess. How many times do you walk downtown and see all the cigarette butts lying around and hate the mess? With our patio season coming, it will be nice to get the area totally ready for hanging out and enjoying our downtown.” People can head over to ZuZu’z today to pick up the items needed for Saturday’s But Blitz. For more information on the campaign, check the website. For more information on the Butt Blitz and where you can find the receptacles, check the Downtown Barrie BIA website.

Volunteers are coming together to clean up the streets in the Butt Blitz. This is the first year Vernon will be participating in the Canada wide initiative to clean up communities and raise awareness about the impact of cigarette butts. “They pollute our environment, contaminate water and soil, poison wildlife and children and start a large number of wildfires. All of these things cost millions of taxpayer dollars to mitigate,” said Jack Elliman, a local organizer. The event starts in the park next to the Greyhound depot at 10 a.m. and end at 4:20 p.m. at the skateboard park at Polson Park. “As we move along we will be counting the butts we collect and announcing the grand gross total at the end of the day,” said Elliman. “All of the collected butts will then be sent to Terracycle for recycling and redeemed for Terracycle points. The more butts we collect the more money we earn for charity.” The event is organized by A Greener Future in partnership with www.BrainGarden.ca

Rider has been ranked in the Princeton Review’s top most sustainable schools in the country and one of the greenest universities in the world by the UI GreenMetric World University Ranking. But what has Rider done to get where it is today? The university has implemented a number of programs that have quickly moved us up in the ranks. One of those programs occurs in every dorm and has a high percentage of Rider’s residential students participating: the amazing Terracycle health and beauty brigade. Terracycle started as a local company based out of Trenton and now operates globally. The health and beauty brigade, in particular, collects difficult-to-recycle plastics that are commonly found in the packaging of beauty and personal care products and either upcycles or recycles them into new products. Shampoo bottles, for instance, are a perfect example of what Terracycle likes to reuse and recycle. When asked what she thinks of the Terracycle health and beauty brigade, Resident Advisor Talauria Wright says, “I love the health and beauty brigade, it’s super easy. Hill Hall always does a fantastic job recycling. The green bucket is always full of stuff.” With these materials, Terracycle takes the shredded and melted down plastics and either makes amazing new packaging for companies like Garnier, Febreze and Colgate or creates outdoor furniture, garden supplies and tote bags. Rider has sent over 27,300 items to Terracycle through the health and beauty brigade so far. Not only does Rider benefit from the health and beauty brigade, but also from Terracycle’s cigarette waste recycling program. Terracycle upcycles cigarette waste into fertilizer and packing peanuts. Rider has sent a whopping total of 24,000 butts to Terracycle so far. Thanks to the cigarette waste recycling program, the university safely disposes of the toxic materials commonly found in cigarettes. Rider is gearing up to begin a new brigade, the writing utensil brigade, thanks to senior Eco Rep Ambria Dell’Oro. With the writing utensil brigade, students will have a safe and sustainable way to dispose of their used writing utensils. It is estimated that over 2 billion mechanical pencils are sold in the United States alone. Terracycle has begun a program to safely recycle all the different writing utensils students use that typically end up in the garbage at the end of their useful life. When asked why she thought Terracycle’s writing utensil brigade would be a good fit for Rider, Ambria Dell’Oro said,“ If you really think about it, not all that much plastic goes into making a pen or mechanical pencil, but 2 billion pens and mechanical pencils in the trash equals a lot of plastic that will never biodegrade. I wanted to start this program at Rider to ensure that students knew about this unknown problem and to make sure students had a way to dispose of these writing products sustainably.” Thanks to Terracycle, Rider is able to properly dispose of difficult-to-recycle materials. Students and faculty alike can rest easy knowing that they have the opportunity to make a difference.

Fanshawe is one of the first schools in Southwestern Ontario to recycle cigarette butts from its campus. Sustainability staff are hopeful that participating in a unique waste management program designed by a company called TerraCycle will decrease the devastating environ­mental impact of a bad habit. To get the most out of the program, stu­dents are urged to do their part and throw their butts in the designated containers, which custodial staff empty regularly into a larger bin that will be shipped to TerraCycle’s Mississauga headquarters. In the past year, Fanshawe ac­cumulated just over 77 pounds of butts. TerraCycle specializes in break­ing down the compounds of materi­als that do not biodegrade or cannot be recycled by the public sector. They compost the natural tobacco content of cigarette butts, while recycling the plastic into materials used to build playgrounds and park benches. The program even pro­vides a reimbursement for its ship­ping fee in the form of a charitable donation. Fanshawe has chosen to redirect these funds back into its sustainability programming. As sustainability co-ordinator Amanda Whittingham said, smok­ers need to think twice before flick­ing their butt onto the ground. There is a common misconception among smokers that cigarette butts are made of cotton. There is even less awareness of how harmful butts are to the environment. “Billions of filters are left on the ground, and their toxins leech into the soil. They can poison the ground water or can clog up the sewage stations and sanitary water stations, and that goes straight into the river,” Whittingham said. At that point, birds and fish con­sume the filters, and the neurotox­ins and hormone disruptors within. Often, this prevents males from properly displaying for mating. Over the process of bioaccumula­tion, humans are likely to eventual­ly ingest the same poisons. While some schools are not able to afford the extra cost of supple­mentary sustainable programs, Fanshawe’s status as one of the province’s four largest colleges has allotted it the freedom to focus on progressing. According to Ivan Walker, senior manager at Facilities Operations and Sustainability, uti­lizing services like TerraCycle will help to set a precedent and pave the way for other colleges. “Fanshawe is also very much about utilizing our resources wise­ly, not only recycling after you’ve used them but also before you’ve used them,” Walker said. “If you happen to see any energy wastages you can also drop a line at sustain­ability@fanshawec.ca and we’ll see if we can attend to those issues.”

WOODSTOCK - The OLG Slots and Raceway in Woodstock has teamed up with TerraCycle to keep cigarette butts out of the landfill. They have joined TerraCycle's province-wide Waste Recycling Program. How it works is the racetrack collects their cigarette butts and ships them to TerraCycle free of charge to be recycled. Once a business signs up for the program you will earn points that can be redeemed for cash donations to the non-profit charity of your choice. Province-wide donations from this program have just surpassed $29,000. Director of Policy and Social Responsibilities at OLG Catherine Jarmain says this was an easy decision for them to join this program. “OLG has been a proud participant of TerraCycle’s Cigarette Waste Recycling Program since 2012. During this time, our site-led recycling programs have contributed to OLG’s environmental footprint reduction and have generated funds that sites then donate to local charities. Last year, OLG sites hosted a total of 14 TerraCycle waste recycling programs which collected 885 kilos of previously non-recyclable waste and raised over $1,900 for local charities. It’s gratifying to know that through one initiative we are improving the environment and, at the same time, helping those in the community who depend on local charities for important services.” TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky explains why they started this program. “Every year, billions of cigarette butts end up in dumpsters and landfills, or get tossed as litter on shorelines, parks, and sidewalks across Canada. We have a big ‘thank you’ for the more than two thousand locations that have helped us collect 73 million cigarette butts through this recycling program.”

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.

The Downtown Barrie BIA is set to ramp up the war on butts. Managing Director Craig Stevens says the Association is looking to buy more than a dozen cigarette receptacles in a bid to keep downtown streets clean of butts. Coun. Doug Shipley added $2,500 for cigarette receptacles in the downtown as part of the 2017 budget. Council's move was in response to complaints about overflowing ashtrays and cigarette butts along Dunlop St. During the budget debatrs, Mayor Jeff Lehman said the city has to have a higher standard of cleanliness in the city core and along the waterfront, as he argued on spending $32,800 on increased maintenance. “We did receive a significant number of complaints this year. With the popularity of our core area and waterfront comes more litter and more mess. As we open the new Centennial Park and the new Meridian Square, we will see the problems getting worse,” Lehman said last month. In May, the annual Butt Blitz event led by A Greener Future has a 2017 goal to pick up 200,000 butts nationally. Barrie's 2016 contribution was 7,475 and organizers are targeting 10,000 this year. ZuZu Fashion Boutique owner Tracey Baker is  Downtown Volunteer Coordinator for the Blitz and has already erected a cigarette receptacle outside of her Dunlop St. East shop. The Butt Blitz is an open event that anyone in Canada can join. Participants can either attend a local cleanup where coordinators are running the event, or participants can collect butts on their own and drop them off to the coordinator afterwards. The goal of the event is to remove as much cigarette butt litter from ecosystems across Canada as possible during a one day Butt Blitz event and send the butts to TerraCycle Canada for recycling. Organizers also hope to raise awareness of the negative impacts that cigarette butt litter has on ecosystems and health.