This Non-Profit Wants to Recycle Your Butts

A Nashville non-profit focused on protecting clean water is asking businesses in Franklin to send off their cigarette butts for a recycling program that turns what most people think of as toxic trash into a useable material.

Water City USA, the non-profit behind the effort, is looking for 20 businesses in Franklin that will package and send cigarette butts to a national recycling company, free of charge.

The butts are sent off to TerraCycle, where they are turned into plastic items such as ash trays and plastic pallets used to hold soda bottles.

Franklin has a smoking rate of about 23 percent, so at an average of half a pack a day for 23 percent of almost 60,000 residents, nearly 50 million cigarette butts would enter the waste stream in Franklin every year. Considering that only about 10 percent of cigarette butts actually get thrown away, there’s a possibility for around 42 million cigarettes butts to make their way to the Harpeth River from Franklin every year, according to information from Water City USA.

“People typically look at [cigarette butts] entirely as waste, but TerraCycle is able to mix cigarette Cigarette Waste Recycling Stats 2015butts with chipped recycled plastic,” said Mark Thien, interim Executive Director for Water City USA. “We are able to keep the cigarette butts from entering the waste stream if we are able to identify responsible community partners that enable us to implement the program.”

Many businesses in Nashville are participating in the recycling effort to keep cigarette butts from polluting waterways. Thien said a major hospital sends off about 60 pounds of cigarette waste every month, the Nashville Predators, Music City Center and One Nashville Place also participate in the effort.

Participating businesses in Franklin will get a little something special for participating in the effort to recycle cigarette butts, which is made possible by a grant of nearly $30,000 from the Tennessee Department of Transportation. Franklin’s 20 participants will receive a stainless steel Metropolitan Smoker’s Tower to give smokers a place to put their butts and businesses a way to easily collect butts to send to TerraCycle to recycle.

To participate in the program, businesses agree to collect cigarette butts into a shipping box, stick the shipping label on it and send the butts off free of charge via UPS.

“That’s sort of low impact for me,” said Donna Willoughby owner’s wife at Handy Hardware. “All I have to do is bag it up and send it away. I don’t have to drive it off anywhere, which would use gas or time. It’s probably the easiest thing for us to do. It’s something that we’re happy to participate in.”

Out of nearly 20 businesses that have been asked, three have agreed to participate, with a few others considering. Handy Hardware on Columbia Ave., as well as Discount Plumbing and Electric are partners in the program, and the Williamson Herald was the first business to sign on to the cigarette butt recycling effort.

Cigarette butts are composed of cellulose acetate, a non-biodegradable plastic which can take up to 25 years to decompose. A single butt can contaminate a liter of water and kill half the fish swimming in it, according to a study by scientists at San Diego State University.

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