Dive Brief:
- An initiative by the nonprofit Waterfront Partnership collected 55,000 cigarette butts from Baltimore's Harbor East neighborhood within six months.
- The group installed 15 collection urns near bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and coffee shops throughout the area and now plans to expand further this fall.
- TerraCycle has been taking the cigarette waste to be processed into compost and shipping pallets.
Dive Insight:
This is part of the Waterfront Partnership's Healthy Harbor Initiative that is trying to make the harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020. The nonprofit also helped fund the popular Mr. Trash Wheel project which collects waste directly from the harbor using a boom and conveyor belt system.
Baltimore is one of many cities that TerraCycle has teamed up with in recent years as part of its Cigarette Waste Brigade program. Other participants include Vancouver, Seattle, St. Louis, New Orleans, Columbia, MO and Salem, MA. For every pound collected, $1 is donated to the Keep America Beautiful Cigarette Litter Prevention Program.
Other efforts have taken a more direct approach by trying to engage with smokers. Chicago recently launched a pilot program in which smokers "vote" on a question—such as whether deep dish pizza or Chicago-style hot dogs are better—by placing their butts in corresponding bins. This was modeled after a similar campaign done by the environmental charity Hubbub in London. Paris has taken the more aggressive stance of raising fines for cigarette littering.
