Has the tobacco industry found a fag end of good?

(Image: Firesafetynetwork) 

Got a 60-a-day habit or know someone who does? Would it make you feel better if you or they could make $30 a year for charity out of it? Or is making money out cigarettes just plain dirty, even if it is for a good cause?

It goes without saying that we at DTGT don't like smoking. We don't think it's big or clever. And it definitely isn't a Green Thing.

But when we heard about TerraCycle teaming up with cigarette companies to start recycling cigarette waste, we were intrigued.

Here's the skinny on what they're doing:

The company 

TerraCycle are known for taking non-recyclable materials and turning them into something else - juice cartons to bags, crisp packets to notebooks, that sort of thing.

They have been keen to work with cigarettes companies for some time and recently they landed two large contracts with two big businesses in America and Canada.

What they're doing

What TerraCycle want to do is collect up all the cigarette butts and other smoking waste and turn them into new products, rather than sending them off to landfills or leaving them littering the land.

The process 

The organic materials (the paper, tobacco and ash) can be composted in specially designed units as they can't simply be thrown into your regular compost due to the chemicals inside.

The cigarette filter is made from a form of plastic called cellulose acetate which will be sanitised and injection-molded into a plastic that can be reused in several different ways - plastic pallets and car berms for factories, for example.

How are they going to get all the butts?

TerraCycle are still looking into how best to collect the smoking waste but the general idea is that smokers collect the ash and butts in sealed bags until they have enough to send via freepost to TerraCycle. For every 1000 butts you send in, they donate $1 to a charity of your choice.

The reaction 

This proposal has prompted much heated discussion and a large number of people are very anti the whole idea. And I think I feel the same.

It feels a bit like putting a tiny plaster over a huge gaping hole. The problem of waste and pollution gets passed down to the consumer, the company gets to wash its hands of the whole thing and then gets to say they're working on reducing the amount of toxic waste, without actually having to do a whole lot for it.

"We know that over a trillion cigarette butts are dropped and left annually, but we've told smokers to recycle them so it's not our fault. Blame them."

Okay, so while that is a made up quote, it isn't a made up statistic. A trillion butts end up in the environment each year. So shouldn't we be doing something to stop this?

I'm also not sure that $1 going to charity for every 1ooo cigarettes you smoke is really going to encourage you to collect up weeks worth of ash and butts. It might be an incentive for bars and clubs to collect up smokers' waste, but the average smoker will probably continue to flick their butt to the floor and forget all about it.

(Image: Sydneycbdhypnosis)

On the other hand though, people aren't going to stop smoking. And while this amount of waste is being produced, getting swept into our rivers, washed into our water systems and blown into our parks, isn't it better than someone tries to divert it? If TerraCycle really can reduce the amount of toxic waste in our environment, isn't this better than saying "Well, people just shouldn't smoke in the first place."?

To be honest, I think my problem with this stems from my feelings about TerraCycle itself. While they do a great job of reusing waste that would otherwise go to landfill, I think that preventing companies from using non-recyclable materials in the first place is a much better cause to get behind.

So instead of celebrating a bag made from juice cartons, I would rather be celebrating juice cartons that can easily be turned back into juice cartons. While this is a conceivable reality (as plenty of other recyclable packaging out there shows), getting people to stop smoking and therefore eliminate the waste problem is a far more difficult and highly unrealistic task.

So does that make cigarette butt recycling a good thing? Or is it a form of green wash and positive press for the cigarette companies? I have to say, I'm still undecided.

But I'd love to hear what you think.

(Spotted on Unconsumption)

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