Recycling bins for cigarette butts coming to downtown Chilliwack

Folks will soon see fewer butts around Chilliwack… cigarette butts, that is.

A total of 30 small recycling bins will be installed throughout downtown Chilliwack specifically for smokers to toss their cigarette butts into.

It’s all part of a new program being launched by the Downtown Chilliwack Business Improvement Association (BIA), in partnership with Ruth and Naomi’s (RAN) and the City of Chilliwack.

An added bonus to having cigarette butts removed from the streets is that residents living in one of RAN’s shelters will reap the financial benefits of it. Not only will they be paid to empty the bins regularly, but they will get money from sending the butts off to be recycled.

The idea to do something about the issue came about when University of the Fraser Valley student Jamie Clare wrote a report last year called ‘Casual Contamination: Chilliwack’s Butt Problem’ for a course called Climate Action: Design as part of his environmental studies degree.

“I chose cigarette butts because they’re a small, seemingly innocuous item that’s littered so commonly that most people don’t even consider it littering,” Clare said. “I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve found cigarette butts in the forest in the middle of nowhere. Almost anywhere you can possibly go, you’ll find littered cigarette butts.”

Trevor McDonald, executive director with the BIA, and Clare connected after McDonald heard about the report from a downtown business owner.

“Jamie came to me with a problem… this was a problem that I was unaware of. I don’t smoke, so I don’t even think about it,” McDonald said.

Coincidentally, just two weeks before he heard about the report, the same topic came up at a BIA B.C. conference that McDonald attended. A woman there was speaking about cigarette butt waste and she later connected McDonald with TerraCycle.

“She got us the TerraCycle bins and introduced me to the program,” McDonald said. “We got 30 of them for free.”

TerraCycle is an international recycling company and one service it offers is the Unsmoke Cigarette Free Recycling Program.

The metal receptacles are 19 inches tall and will be attached to poles in the downtown area. The city began installing them on Jan. 13 and folks with RAN will maintain them, McDonald said.

People may have seen RAN’s street cleaning crew around town. Every weekend they pick up trash throughout downtown Chilliwack as part of RAN’s peer support program that is run out of their Revive Shelter.

“They are paid and supervised for the hours they work in various programs such as; downtown street cleaning, snow removal, community kitchen, and now the cigarette recycling program,” said Scott Gaglardi, RAN executive director. “This is all part of the programming and supports we provide to help people who are currently housed in shelters to make some income, but even more importantly, to develop further employment skills and life skills that will prepare them for more permanent housing.”

The RAN crew will empty the receptacles weekly. The butts will then be bagged up, put in pre-paid shipping boxes and mailed to a TerraCycle recycling location where they go through a multi-step process to separate the tobacco and ash from the plastic filter. The tobacco, ash, rolling paper and other organic material is composted and turned into industrial fertilizer (for non-food use) while the cigarette filters are turned into plastic pellets that are used to make new products, such as park benches.

It’s a free program and those who send the butts in to be recycled can collect TerraCycle points which can be redeemed for a monetary donation to an organization.

That money will go back RAN, McDonald added.

If it turns out to be successful, they will look into installing more receptacles.

“That would be my hope – to expand this to the whole city,” McDonald said.

Cigarette butts are not biodegradable. Studies show that one single cigarette butt can contaminate up to 1,000 litres of groundwater, Clare noted in his report.

“For a lot of people, tossing their cigarette butts out the car window or on the sidewalk is a deeply-ingrained habit that they don’t even think about,” Clare said.

RELATED: Bag of cigarette butts raises concern for wildfire risk in Chilliwack River Valley

“One of the things I hope the most for out of this project is to make people a little bit more aware; to make something that might have started as a thoughtless habit become a place to start a conversation about the impact one person can have in protecting the beautiful places that we live.”