Through a partnership with worldwide recycling pioneer TerraCycle, the shopping center recently signed on to participate in a Cigarette Waste Brigade, in which cigarette butts are collected and recycled into plastic pellets for industrial use.

The waste goes to a company called TerraCycle — partnered with Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. — that converts the cigarettes butts into a variety of products, primarily plastic pallets for industrial uses. About 65 percent of all cigarette butts are disposed of improperly and account for 38 percent of all U.S. roadway litter, according to Keep America Beautiful.

A subsidiary of the nation's second-largest cigarette maker, Reynolds American Inc., is funding a national recycling program to reward do-gooders for cleaning up tobacco waste and turn cigarette buts into pellets used to make items such as plastic shipping pallets, railroad ties, and park benches.

TerraCycle, a small upcycling company based in New Jersey, has launched its new program, Cigarette Waste Brigade, which aims to collect various wastes from cigarettes and tobaccos – cigarette butts, rolling papers, loose tobacco pouches, plastic wrapper, foil, and ashes. Cigarette butts are one of the wastes that are most of the time disposed of improperly. In fact, about 65% of cigarettes are littered by smokers and cigarette is the number one waste recovered from oceans with a total of 52 million cigarette filters in 25 years. TerraCycle, known for collecting and processing hard-to-recycle wastes to produce various consumer products, has added another item to their list. In their Cigarette Waste Brigade program, they allow cigarette smokers (strictly 19 years old and above), bar and restaurant owners, building managers, and litter clean-up groups to participate by having their cigarette wastes collected and get paid in return in terms of charitable gifts or cash.

A subsidiary of the nation’s second-largest cigarette maker, Reynolds American Inc., is funding a national recycling program to reward do-gooders for cleaning up tobacco waste and turn cigarette butts into pellets used to make items such as plastic shipping pallets, railroad ties and park benches. New Mexico-based Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co., the maker of Natural American Spirit cigarettes, is teaming up with TerraCycle Inc. for the program. It aims to snuff out one of the most littered items in the U.S. About 135 million pounds of cigarette butts annually are tossed on roadways, thrown in the trash or put in public ashtrays. Through the Cigarette Waste Brigade program, groups as well as people 21 and older can collect cigarette waste and send them to TerraCycle through a prepaid shipping label. Participants will get credits to be donated to Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit community action and education organization. They’ll receive about $1 per pound of litter, which equals about 1,000 cigarette butts.

TerraCycle, a small upcycling company based in New Jersey, has launched its new program, Cigarette Waste Brigade, which aims to collect various wastes from cigarettes and tobaccos – cigarette butts, rolling papers, loose tobacco pouches, plastic wrapper, foil, and ashes. Cigarette butts are one of the wastes that are most of the time disposed of improperly. In fact, about 65% of cigarettes are littered by smokers and cigarette is the number one waste recovered from oceans with a total of 52 million cigarette filters in 25 years. TerraCycle, known for collecting and processing hard-to-recycle wastes to produce various consumer products, has added another item to their list. In their Cigarette Waste Brigade program, they allow cigarette smokers (strictly 19 years old and above), bar and restaurant owners, building managers, and litter clean-up groups to participate by having their cigarette wastes collected and get paid in return in terms of charitable gifts or cash. The cigarette wastes are then made into industrial plastic pallets and compost material. The program is sponsored by Santa Fe  Natural Tobacco Company, the manufacturer of Natural American Spirit brand cigarettes. This may actually sound inappropriate as they are the very producers of these goods that are neither beneficial to the people and the environment. Nevertheless, while the tobacco industry exists, their monetary efforts may also count in helping our environment.

As Earth911 recently reported, cigarettes can now be recycled in the U.S. thanks to a new partnership between TerraCycle, a company that finds recycling solutions for items that aren't easy to recycle, and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. TerraCycle collects discarded cigarettes that people mail to them through their Cigarette Waste Brigade and turns the filters into industrial products such as shipping pallets and plastic lumber. This program is unique and tackles a real environmental problem, since cigarette waste can be found on most roadways and is very common at beaches. The real mystery here is how a cigarette becomes a new product like a shipping pallet. To find out, Earth911 talked with Ernie Simpson, Global VP of Research & Development for TerraCycle. How Cigarette Recycling Works To find a viable recycling solution for a huge waste stream such as cigarettes, TerraCycle had to consider processes that could handle large volumes of material. The method the company's researchers settled on can be broken down into a few main steps. "We collect the filters and sterilize them through irradiation," Simpson said. "Then we separate the tobacco from the filter and paper." To separate the parts of the cigarette, the materials are shredded. Afterward, the tobacco and paper are both composted, and TerraCycle sends the tobacco to a special composting facility that only composts tobacco products. After that, they're left with just the filters, the part of the cigarette that gets recycled into new materials. "The filter is cellulose acetate, a plastic that can be recycled with other plastic materials," Simpson explained. "We blend the cellulose acetate with other recyclable materials. Then we use those to create different items." To create the appropriate blend of plastic, TerraCycle mixes the filters with other plastic they have in house. Once mixed, the plastic is turned into pellets, which can then be molded into new products. "Creating plastic pallets for shipping made from cigarette filters is really cool," Simpson said, and it's certainly not something you see everyday. Ensuring Recycled Filters Are Safe One potential concern about this process is safety: will any contaminants make their way into the new products? "We have tested our formulations for everything from possible food contact to heavy metal contamination to nicotine contamination," Simpson explained. His team has also tested for any microbes or bacteria to ensure to products' safety. "By diluting the filters with other plastic material you dilute any other agents. The other materials have no nicotine or anything of that sort, so simply by blending [the filters and other plastic] at a certain ratio you can reduce the presence of any of those materials," Simpson said. To be on the safe side, TerraCycle never uses recycled cigarette filters in any consumer products that might come into contact with food or other consumables. All filters find their way into new industrial products. Get Involved TerraCycle hopes to collect and recycle hundreds of millions of cigarette butts through the Cigarette Waste Brigade, and the recycling process will make a significant impact when it comes to reducing waste. Creating pallets and other products out of cigarette waste instead of virgin plastic reduces both the amount of waste in landfills and the quantity of virgin materials needed to make new products. To get involved and start collecting cigarette waste, visit TerraCycle's Cigarette Waste Brigade webpage. Anyone 21 years of age or older can start collecting as an individual or part of a group. You could also find out if any anti-litter groups in your area are already collecting cigarette butts and team up with them. Setting up a collection at your workplace or a business you frequent might be another good option. Want to learn how to recycle other unusual materials? Check Out: Recycling Mystery: Toothbrushes and Toothpaste Tubes

Tom Szaky collects the most disgusting things. Yucky yogurt containers. Sticky candy wrappers. Old flip-flops. Now, he and his Trenton company, TerraCycle, are onto a new one: cigarette butts, the most common litter items on the planet. (And much, much worse items, but that comes later.) So bring 'em on. Let neither stinkiness nor sogginess nor other manner of nastiness be a barrier. Once in hand, the company will "sanitize" and sort the butts, sending the paper and tobacco to a specialty tobacco composter. The filters will be melted and re-formed into pellets, eventually to end up as two different but butt-worthy items - ashtrays and park benches. For every 1,000 butts sent in by a TerraCycle member (find out more at www.terracycle.com), a dollar will go to the national anti-littering nonprofit, Keep America Beautiful. Szaky said the new butt program "will help to promote our belief that everything can and should be recycled." It's part of his plan to "eliminate the idea of waste." Targeting butts should be easy. They're everywhere. A 2009 Keep America Beautiful study found that 65 percent of cigarette butts wind up as litter. In a quarter century of beach cleanups, volunteers for the Ocean Conservancy have picked up more than 52 million butts - the most pervasive item they find. Many beaches now limit smoking to designated areas. Campuses fed up with spending thousands of dollars picking up the things have considered bans. Still the butts come. They are more than unsightly. Peer-reviewed studies have detailed how metals leach from smoked cigarettes. And how chemicals in the butts are harmful to fish, which is relevant because many butts wind up in waterways. Even when butts are picked up - or not littered to begin with - they add to the waste stream piling up in our landfills. Keep America Beautiful has actually studied butt locales. Most (85 percent) wind up on the open ground, followed by bushes or shrubbery, then around - not in - trash receptacles. The final 15 percent get stubbed out in planters. Most butt litterers "drop with intent." Others flick and fling. And can you guess the spots with the highest littering rates? Hospitals and other medical sites. This is not the first effort to curb butt-waste. A decade ago, Chris Woolson, a Philadelphia software designer, started a website, www.litterbutt.com, through which people can report license plate numbers of automotive butt-flickers. The site now has more than 3,700 members - a passionate group, judging by the posts - who have generated 86,700 reports. Szaky's genius lies in getting regular people to do the collecting. He partners with companies that want to take responsibility for the end-life of their products - in this case, Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co., a Reynolds American subsidiary. They fund the shipping, processing, and a small donation to nonprofits. So school groups are a big source of items, because the donation can go back to them. Then TerraCycle makes stuff from the items and sells it. Given Szaky's eco-goals, some criticize his collection of non-green "waste" as validating companies that make it. He counters that his job is to collect waste, not to judge it. Indeed, with the butt campaign, he's now partnering with two of the three "Merchant of Death" industries, although he'd rather not put it that way. He's already recycling wine corks from the liquor industry, and the day I talked to him, he was pondering Christmas lights made from the casings of shotgun shells. He judged the result "charming." Others pooh-pooh such radical recycling, contending that it consumes more energy than it saves. Szaky says about 50 independent life-cycle analyses show otherwise. TerraCycle has programs for 47 categories of products, from toothpaste tubes to energy bar wrappers, chip bags to cheese packaging, shoes to MP3 players. As of last week, more than 32 million people had collected nearly 2.5 billion "waste units." More than $4.7 million had been returned to nonprofits. But is there no limit? Trying to think of things just as disgusting as cigarette butts, I teasingly asked Szaky if he was considering a program for, say, chewed gum. Egad. Turns out he is. And it gets better. Or worse. He's in top-secret talks with companies to find uses for soiled diapers, feminine hygiene products, and condoms. What's next? Fingernail clippings?

Separate your recycling: glass with glass, and cigarette butts with cigarette butts. The little smoked ends of filters that clutter street corners and beaches will be "upcycled" into pellets by Terracycle, according to SF Weekly. The company specializes in hard-to-recycle materials, and cigarette butts, with their cellulose acetate filters, are very hard to recycle. They are apparently also hard to throw away in a proper waste bin, with 65 percent of smokers discarding their butts on streets, in parks, or beaches -- anywhere but a trash can. TerraCycle will repurpose the cellulose acetate into shipping pallets, and is doing so in partnership with the Santa Fe Tobacco Company, which produces American Spirits. But there's no curbside collection: recycling-minded smokers will have to collect their butts in a plastic bag and mail them. Copyright NBC Owned Television Stations

Earlier this fall—well before Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the New Jersey coast and changed the conversation about climate disruption and its consequences—the Sierra Club's New Jersey Chapter and recycling pioneer TerraCycle teamed up to do a beach cleanup in the coastal community of Belmar. The Belmar beach cleanup was organized in conjunction with the Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup Day, which the conservancy has mobilized for the last 25 years. More than 52 million cigarette butts have been collected from beaches on cleanup days over that span. "Eighty-five volunteers collected over 4,300 cigarette butts, 700 bottle caps, 600 wrappers, and 330 straws off the beach," says New Jersey Chapter organizer Nicole Dallara. "The discarded cigarette butts were then sent to TerraCycle, which 'upcycles' them into new products like shipping products, plastic lumber, railroad ties, and other items after the waste gets converted into plastic pellets." Trenton-based TerraCycle, whose motto is "Eliminate the Idea of Waste," has created more than 40 waste collection programs, or "brigades," one of which is the Cigarette Brigade, which it operates in partnership with the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, makers of American Spirit cigarettes. "You don't have to walk or drive very far to see that smokers often discard cigarette waste in ways that litter the environment," Cressida Lozano, head of sales and marketing for Santa Fe, told The Trentonian newspaper. "We're proud to be the exclusive sponsor of an innovative program to reduce and recycle cigarette butt litter, regardless of which manufacturer made the cigarettes." Many of TerraCycle's brigade programs, including the Cigarette Brigade, offer free shipping, and in many cases the company will make a donation to participants for each piece of garbage they collect. "You can collect all parts of extinguished cigarettes and ship them to TerraCycle to be recycled, and they'll pay for the shipping, so it's completely free," says Dallara, pictured at left. "All you have to do is sign up and join one of their brigade programs. And now that the New Jersey Chapter has participated in International Coastal Cleanup Day, TerraCycle wants to work with other Sierra Club chapters as well."