The global World Oceans Day is June 8 (originally celebrated at the urging of Canada in 1992), but every day is a good day to find and cultivate ways to engage communities and make resources for clean ocean actions accessible. My company TerraCycle teamed up with Procter & Gamble, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world, to create bottles made with recycled beach plastic for Head & Shoulders (the #1 shampoo brand in the world) and Fairy (the UK’s #1 dishwashing brand) in Europe.  

“In Toronto, a million cigarette butts are dropped on the ground every year,” she said. “They can be recycled through TerraCycle and are ground up into plastic pellets that can be used in things like furniture.”

Osoyoos Council has a couple of new initiatives to ponder, compliments of Osoyoos Secondary School students. Grade 11 students from the school Tuesday made two presentations to Council as part of their English 11 programming, asking the Town to ponder a more robust program to remove cigarette butts from the community and to ban plastic straws in restaurants.

Certain kinds of packaging are just too hard for recycling programs to handle. Some require consumers to take a few extra steps to disassemble them before dropping them in the blue box... A company called TerraCycle collects and recycles a small amount. British Columbia is looking into turning these into fuel pellets. Others are also looking into turning the materials into fuel or incorporating it into plywood.

Trying to recycle everything—including hard-to-recycle items like coffee pods and cigarette butts—can come at a high cost... Businesses like TerraCycle act like a go-between, approaching companies making hard-to-recycle products and asking them to pay the cost of recycling. In return consumers can send the products off to a private recycling plant for free, and they feel good about it.

There might be a way to recycle those coffee pods after all. A company called TerraCycle aims to "recycle everything" — from cigarette butts to squeeze pouches. It's funded by the brands selling hard-to-recycle products and consumers willing to cover shipping costs.

Cette entreprise de Toronto peut tout recycler, même les produits non-recyclables. Les capsules Nespresso? Ça se recycle. Ces mégots de cigarette jetés à la poubelle composés de papier, de tabac, de cendre et de plastique? Pas facile, mais c’est aussi recyclable, selon TerraCycle, une filiale d’une entreprise du New Jersey établie à Toronto, et dont l’objectif est de convaincre toutes les villes du pays qu’il est possible de tout récupérer. C’est toujours mieux que de remplir les dépotoirs, explique Jessica Panetta, directrice du marketing pour TerraCycle au Canada.

Some recycling programs facilitated by private companies — including the manufacturers of products that aren't easily recyclable — are filling the gap in order to divert some of that waste away from the landfill... "Everything technically has a recycling solution," said Jessica Panetta, marketing manager for the Canadian branch for the New Jersey-based TerraCycle.

If you're feeling guilty about all the coffee pods or squeeze pouches you're tossing in the trash, here's some good news: There are ways to recycle these and many other "unrecyclable" items... TerraCycle is one company aiming to "recycle everything."    

This weekend’s Butt Blitz in Vernon resulted in thousands upon thousands of discarded cigarette butts being collected... All of the butts will be sent to TerraCycle in Toronto where the leftover tobacco and paper materials are composted.