The Battle Against Butts
Here at A Greener Future, we organize and motivate people to help pick up cigarette butts and other litter through events like our Butt Blitz. By also providing information and content online, we hope we can aid in reducing cigarette litter locally through education and prevention. But, cigarette litter is a global problem, which means people everywhere are tackling these issues in many ways. For this reason, we’ve decided to share some different approaches organizations, governments, and private companies are using to take a stance on cigarette litter.
Action through prevention
Seeing as cigarette litter is such a widespread problem across the world, many organizations (like A Greener Future!) conduct cleanups in high-risk areas. Cigarette litter can also be fought through prevention, which is something that various chapters of the Surfrider Foundation did. Surfrider is an organization that covers on-the-ground work along with advocacy, on local, regional, and national levels to protect marine coastlines. Across the world, in places including California and Vancouver Island, Surfrider chapters have installed cylindrical cigarette receptacles on lamp posts and trees, in an effort to both prevent and monitor cigarette litter.
As part of their “Hold On To Your Butt” campaign, the Surfrider Foundation installs cigarette receptacles in select communities throughout Canada and the United States. Source: Fernwood NRG.
Action on a Municipal Level
Cities and municipal governments can also take on independent initiatives to cut down or clean up cigarette litter. This can take the form of prevention through policy; instituting fines for people caught littering cigarette butts, or outright banning smoking publicly outside of designated areas as they have done in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Municipalities can also implement other preventative measures like installing cigarette receptacles in highly littered areas. When these collection plans also include cigarette butt recycling, they even further mitigate the environmental damage from a cigarette butt.
The City of Hamilton is a great example of a government taking initiative to fight back against butts! In April 2019, A Greener Future hosted a Butt Blitz event in Hamilton where we picked up 37,052 cigarette butts, resulting in cleaner streets and a heightened awareness of cigarette litter. In terms of prevention, the city has standardized bright pink receptacles in areas where smoking is permitted, along with free pocket ashtrays that a smoker can carry with them for responsible butt disposal on the go.
37,052 cigarette butts were picked up at the Hamilton Butt Blitz in 2019.
Corporate Innovation
Companies have also joined the fight against cigarette butts! At A Greener Future, we send out the cigarette butts we have collected to TerraCycle, an American company that specializes in recycling “challenging items” that are more work to recycle; like cigarettes, shaving razors, oral care and skin care products. By focusing on products municipal recycling programs don’t cover, and by partnering with larger corporations, they can recycle these items in bulk.
Terracycle places a great amount of emphasis on the user experience. They have a very user-friendly process for receiving cigarette butts, which is entirely cost-free as they cover shipping themselves. Once the cigarette butts have been collected, the plastic filters are separated from the rest of the cigarette butt. The filter is melted down to make hard plastic, and the remaining paper, ash and tobacco are composted. More information can be found on their four-step process here. With this kind of innovation, TerraCycle encourages proper waste disposal, diverting butts from ending up in landfills and the natural environment, while also giving them a chance at a “second life”.
Terracycle recycles cigarette waste and gives it a chance at a new life. Source: Terracycle.
Knowing how prevalent cigarette litter is, it’s super encouraging that there are so many entities around the globe that are unified by their goal of eliminating cigarette litter. So, even if you aren’t exactly “part of the problem”, you can still become part of the solution by learning about the issue and sharing the resources we’ve created as part of our "Virtual Butt Blitz” on our website and Instagram feed.
Program Assistant, A Greener Future