New Orleans sells the cigarette butts to a company called TerraCycle, based in Trenton, New Jersey at $4 a pound. The company then goes to work processing the butts into useful things. The organic parts of the butts, the paper and tobacco, are turned into compost. The tobacco is not used to make more cigarettes.

Next week the students and teachers at Flanders Elementary School will unveil their new playground made from recycled oral care products after winning the TerraCycle® Recycled Playground Challenge. A ribbon cutting ceremony is planned at the Victoria Drive school at 10 a.m. Oct. 21. Flanders Elementary earned the highest total number of Playground Credits in the TerraCycle® Recycled Playground Challenge to become the grand prize winner of a playground made from toothpaste tubes, toothbrushes and floss containers.

At TerraCycle, I find myself in the center of this argument all the time. While we do work with major brands and manufacturers to create more circular solutions for their pre- and post-consumer packaging waste, I also view myself as an environmentalist. As an environmentalist, I believe that we should be seeking to maximize the recyclability of all packaging formats.

To reduce some of this waste, my company, TerraCycle, has a variety of recycling programs for commonly difficult-to-recycle performance snack packages. Fitness enthusiasts can now recycle their GU Energy Labs product packaging, Clif Bar and LARABAR wrappers, and Bear Naked granola pouches through our free recycling platforms.

TerraCycle is part of New Zealand’s disruptive circular economy and it’s taken charge of recycling the waste that other agencies deem unsavoury or difficult to recycle or that can’t be disposed of through local council municipal bins.

This time we had an exhilarating conversation with Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle, an international leader in the collection and repurposing of hard-to-recycle post-consumer waste, from used chip bags to cigarette butts. Though he’s very passionate about garbage, his main interest lies in ways to reduce waste to almost zero. For him smart and circular cities cannot exist without changing the behavior of consumers.

Recycling in the United States is an economically unsustainable trend — or at least that’s what New York Times writer John Tierney recently argued in his opinion piece, “The Reign of Recycling," published in the October 4^th Sunday Review. Tierney’s arguments focus almost entirely on the inefficiency and economic viability of recycling, suggesting that CPG companies and major brands, municipalities, and even consumers should stop worrying about recycling, and that linear disposal methods are successful enough for the sake of cost-effectiveness and profitability. I believe that this is a dangerous conclusion to make in the 21^st century, a time where the need for long-term sustainability strategies and circular waste solutions are more apparent than ever.

Toothbrushes TerraCycle recycles items that don’t quite fit the recycling bin.

We hear how he has built a $22 million without paid advertising – Tom Szaky CEO TerraCycle. Szaky is founder and chief executive officer of TerraCycle, a company that enables consumers to collect non-recyclable waste, from used juice pouches to used cigarettes. The collected material is then reused, upcycled, or recycled into thousands of various products and materials.