Cigarette butts recycled in Montreal pilot project

An environmental action group in Montreal wants to rid the streets of a perennial eyesore and turn them into a reusable resource.

Since June, the Société pour l'action, l'éducation et la sensibilisation environnementale de Montréal, or SAESEM, has installed dozens of bins for cigarette butts that are then shipped to a recycling plant near Toronto.

So far, there are bins along Ste-Catherine Street in the Gay Village and parts of Old Montreal.

SAESEM claims to have already redirected 10,000 butts a week from going onto the streets and into city sewers, and says it can double the number by March, when the pilot project ends.

"Beyond the numbers, it's about all the butts that are not staying on our streets," said Raphael Nguyen, project development coordinator for SAESEM.

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Here's how it works: every week SAESEM collects the butts from the bins and ships them to TerraCycle, a company near Toronto that does the recycling.

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

TerraCycle pays for the shipping but keeps all the profits from the sale of the recycled plastic.

Montreal is the third city in Canada to start recycling cigarette butts, after Toronto and Vancouver, which started its program in 2013.

Nguyen hopes the program will expand beyond the Village and Old Montreal next year.

According to a study published by the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., six trillion cigarettes are smoked every year worldwide, and about 4.5 trillion are discarded into the environment.

Cigarette filters are made from cellulose acetate, a plastic, and take from 18 months to 10 years to decompose, according to research from Longwood University in Virginia.