Montreal group collects cigarette butts for recycling

CTV Montreal: Recycling cigarette butts Thirty bins have been installed in the Village and in Old Montreal designed for smokers to throw out their cigarette butts.

A pilot project is making Montreal streets cleaner and helping the environment at the same time.

An environmental organization installed 30 bins in the Village and in Old Montreal last month designed for smokers to throw out their cigarette butts -- which are then recycled.

Every week, the Zero Butts Action Society collects the cigarette butts from the bins and ships them to TerraCycle to transform them.

There, tobacco, ash and paper are turned into compost and the plastic in the filters gets mixed with other recycled plastic and made into new products.

Since the bins were installed in June, the group has collected 50,000 cigarette butts.

In order to increase that number, the group is launching an education campaign to not only encourage Montrealers to use the bins but to teach them about how big a problem cigarette butts are for the environment.

"There are millions of them sold every year, so its a really big problem, not only here in Montreal but everywhere in the world," said Raphael Nguyen, development coordinator for environmental group SAESEM. "So if we can find a real solution that works in our city, maybe it can work elsewhere. So there's a lot of possibility."

The city of Montreal, in partnership with the Ville-Marie borough, has contributed $25,000 to the project.

The action group says cigarette butts represent 30 per cent of the garbage found on the street, and the plastic from cigarette filters can take up to 10 years to decompose.

The group hopes to double the number of butts they collect between now and March when the project finishes and they hope to bring it back next year.