Where should you put your butt? In the can
FLORENCE — The mayor is asking residents to take some care where they put their butts.
Cigarette butts, that is.
Mayor Steve Holt is experimenting with a way to reduce the number of cigarette butts dropped on sidewalks.
Several butt receptacles have been installed around City Hall and the Florence-Lauderdale Government building downtown.
They differ from ordinary receptacles in two ways. One, they are bolted to the pavement and can only be opened with a key. Two, when the receptacles are full, the butts will be mailed to a company that converts them to a form of plastic for other uses.
The filters are sterilized, shredded and melted for use by industries interested in raw materials for recycled products.
"I've been watching people around City Hall, and they are using them," Holt said. "I'm really pleased. I hope we can make some inroads with them."
Cigarette filters contain toxins which can leach into the ground and waterways when dropped on the pavement. A butt can remain intact for years, unlike organic materials.
Holt said the receptacle and the company that recycles butts, Teracycle, were brought to his attention by Public Works Director David Koonce and Recycling Education Outreach Director Rachel Mansell.
"I think what caught David and Rachel's attention is that there is not a place to put butts," he said.
"The first problem we needed to solve was to find people a place to put their butts," Koonce said. "It's easy for people to just flick them."
Five receptacles have been mounted around the two government buildings, Koonce said, and several have been ordered for the gas and electricity departments. The boxes, which are stainless steel, cost $100 each.
"We can gather a box full and mail them to Teracycle," he said. "We don't make any money on them, but we get rid of them. Otherwise, they would wash down a storm drain and eventually into the river.
The Recycling Department has applied for a grant from Keep America Beautiful to install more of the receptacles on city property, he said.
"Private businesses and individuals can contact us about the boxes, or about buying them," Koonce said. "Anyone can use them."
The recycling team at Menallen Elementary School takes its task seriously because there is a lot at stake.
There’s money on the line, a playground that needs funded and a world that needs saved.
The seven-member team of fifth- and sixth-graders makes its rounds at the start of the school day twice a week to round up recyclable items collected in each classroom.
The school is in competition mode from September to April, going up against a hundred other schools from across the nation in the PepsiCo Recycle Rally to collect the most plastic and aluminum containers. Big money is up for grabs for the top 25 schools.
Recycling bins can be found in every classroom at Menallen, in the cafeteria, in the hallway, in the teachers’ lounge. Students know to recycle their containers at breakfast and lunch.
“It’s ingrained in the students here. We have them trained where they just do it,” said media specialist Christa Sabatula, who with the help of her mother, Janet Gallagher, a retired Laurel Highlands teacher and volunteer at Menallen, has headed the program since its inception by former school principal Paula Work.
The school has operated a recycling program and competed for prizes annually since 2011, said Sabatula, starting with a competition run by New Jersey recycling company TerraCycle, which required students to collect various waste products to be recycled.
Under PepsiCo Recycling’s contest, the school competes in the Challenge League, collecting plastics No. 1 and No. 2, aluminum and tin and self-reporting the collected weight. The school with the highest recycling total over the course of the year wins a grand prize of $50,000, with each subsequent school through 25th place earning an incremental dollar amount down to $1,000.
As of Feb. 20, Menallen ranked No. 15 with approximately 192,000 containers recycled this school year.
In the past, the school has placed as high as 14th, winning $2,000 in 2017.
The awards the school earns through its recycling efforts are funneled into improvements to its playground to expand the play area and ensure handicapped accessibility for special-needs students.
But Sabatula said the program began at the school not to win money, but simply to reduce waste. Being rewarded for their efforts has been a perk.
“There’s no real money coming in unless you win,” said Sabatula. “If you don’t win, you’re still recycling. You’re still doing something good. That’s the point. It helps the environment, and it teaches the kids a lesson.”
The recycling program is especially beneficial to those students who participate on the recycling team, said Sabatula, because it not only makes them environmentally conscious, but it also teaches them about job responsibilities.
“The kids apply for this job. They have to fill out a job application. They need a resume and have to go through an interview process. Once they get the job, they have to maintain good grades,” she said.
Menallen has teamed with Goodwill Industries to haul away the recyclables every Friday to its Fayette Recycling Center in Uniontown, which diverts aluminum cans, tin cans, glass, plastic, cardboard, newspaper and high-grade office paper from going to the landfill.
Collection became so large that the school was routinely filling the six containers reserved for recycling, prompting Menallen Township last school year to lend the school a dumpster to keep on the premises to store recyclables. A second dumpster was added this school year to keep up with collection efforts.
Teachers, staff, parents and community members can drop off their recyclables at a collection area located outside the school.
“The goal is to reach a couple more people every year,” said Sabatula.
A revolutionary company called 
"Ideally we're going towards becoming a zero waste school, which is a huge undertaking because it means everything we take into the school has an end purpose and an end life," said Jesuit physics teacher Jennie Kuenz, who's headed up the recycling program.
It's become a movement that kids are getting behind. A few years ago, the school started an environmental science elective class.
Grace Wetzler is a junior and has taken the class. "We made a water filter and studied micro-plastics in the ocean and that kind of inspired me to look at what we throw away and how that pretty much ends up in the ocean," she said.
Alex Guitteiu, a senior, agrees. "Yeah it's definitely a mindset shift. I think it has to do with your perception of when you throw something away, what happens to that."
"You can see students applying what they have learned and internalizing it and recognizing that their decisions actually matter," says Kuenz.
Becoming zero waste will realistically be a 10-year process, but Jesuit could become the first Oregon school to do it. They're already switching to refillable dry erase markers, looking at pumps instead of packets for ketchup and mustard, and yes, straws are going bye-bye.
Students are on board, knowing the future relies on them.
"If my generation doesn't start fixing all our problems, nobody is going to fix it, now is the time," said junior Elizabeth Kapellakis.
I watched the conveyor belt whiz past and recognized the brand of toothbrush I use. And was that the same takeout sushi container I get all the time? Could those plastic items heading to the landfill have been mine?
As the founder of Sea Hugger, a nonprofit organization working to protect the marine environment from plastic pollution, I was invited to tour Recology’s San Francisco Recycling Center to see how the recycling process works. Recology is employee-owned and committed to recycling as much waste as possible. But with the average American producing 4.4 pounds of trash per day, the sheer volume of materials that pass through the facility is astounding.
According to Robert Reed, Recology’s Public Relations Manager, “Six hundred tons of material comes through the tipping floor each day, that’s equivalent to the weight of 38 Muni buses.” Recology said the most efficient way to manage our waste isn’t to rely on recycling; it is to consume fewer single-use items.
I stood on that tipping floor and saw those muni bus-sized piles of rubbish spilling out of Recology’s trucks into a massive jumble of paper, plastic, glass, and metal. The beep beep beep of the reversing trucks and the cacophony of crashes, crunches, and breaking glass assaulted my ears. As did the unpleasant odor; it was as if I had stepped into my recycling bin.
We left the tipping floor and climbed a flight of stairs to the landing of the first conveyor belt where the initial sorting is done by hand. The conveyor belt moved at high speed as five sorters stood on each side grabbing plastic bags and tossing them into a shoot marked Landfill. Now that China stopped buying our recyclables, the plastic wholesale market has dropped from $120 to just $5 a ton, and there is no market for plastic bags, which despite being banned in San Francisco in 2007, were found throughout the facility in startling numbers.
The second stage of the sorting involved an optical sorting machine that shot a blast of air when it identified a piece of plastic ejecting it into a large bin for baling. There are two issues here: first, the optics cannot identify black plastic on the black conveyor belt; and second, no small items (straws, utensils, lids, stirrers, etc.) are recognized by the optics. Off to the landfill they go.
I hear the excuse all the time, “I use single-use plastic, but I recycle it, so it’s OK.” Unfortunately, that is not the truth. Approximately 91% of all plastic waste ever created has never been recycled. I witnessed this shocking statistic while standing alongside the conveyor belt. There is no way to ensure that everything you place in your recycling bin and wheel to the curb each week is actually getting recycled.
“Low oil prices make it cheaper for companies to just make plastic from scratch,” according to TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky. There is little incentive to use recycled materials, and even if all plastic was recycled, it is made from crude oil and cannot be recycled indefinitely. At some point it is discarded, takes centuries to degrade, and current scientific research shows it is toxic to us and our environment. Are we really OK with this?
We are at the tipping point. We now know that plastic exists in one form or another forever and has caused severe damage to our oceans. An estimated 100 million aquatic animals die every year because they mistake plastic debris for food. If this does not disturb you, consider that microplastic (plastic pieces less than five millimeters long) has been found in our water supply, soil, salt, beer, seafood, bottled water, and has recently been discovered in human feces. Marine plastic is impacting our food chain and as it breaks down, releases greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. Furthermore, the health of the ocean is unequivocally vital to the health of our planet.
Americans consume twice as much as those in developing nations, and our buying patterns affect what large corporations offer. If we demand change, support ecologically responsible companies, and replace our consumables with reusables, our collective voice will be heard.
A great example of this is when the public’s demand for organic produce and ingredients persuaded mainstream food producers to offer more organic options. As one of the wealthiest nations, Americans have a lot of power to affect change. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the wallet is mightier than the corporate board. Let’s stop assuming we can recycle our way out of the plastic pollution epidemic and refuse, rethink, and reuse. We caused this problem. Together we can fix it.
Shell Cleave is the founder of Sea Hugger, a nonprofit organization based in Half Moon Bay, CA is focused on eliminating marine plastic pollution.
Tom Szaky is a leading force in the sustainability world. The founder of