TRENTON, New Jersey: Recycling entrepreneur Tom Szaky is stubbing
out the world's cigarette problem -- one butt at a
time.
The 30-year-old who dropped out of Princeton University to start
his innovative company TerraCycle in Trenton, New Jersey, says
there's no such thing as trash, even when you're talking about the
contents of ashtrays.
In a program started in May in Canada and now running from the
United States to Spain, TerraCycle collects cigarette butts from
volunteers and turns them into plastic, which can be used for
anything, even ashtrays themselves.
The discarded cigarettes, which litter countries around the world,
are first broken up, with the paper and remaining tobacco
composted.
The filter, made of a plastic called cellulose acetate, is melted
down and turned into an ingredient for making a wide range of
industrial plastic products, such as pallets -- the trays used to
ship heavy goods.
The tobacco industry, happy to get some decent publicity, pays
TerraCycle.
Volunteer collectors win points per butt, which can then be
redeemed as contributions to charities.
Sidewalks start looking cleaner. And TerraCycle, which sells
recycled products to retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods, gets
more business.
TerraCycle has a similarly creative view on all manner of other
refuse that has tended to be bracketed as impossible to recycle and
is instead sent to the landfill.
Juice sachets, plastic bottles, pens, coffee capsules, candy
wrappers, toothbrushes and computer keyboards are all grist for
TerraCycle's mill.
Some items go to classic recycling, meaning they are used purely as
material for a wholly new product.
Others are upcycled, which means the shape of the piece of garbage
is retained and incorporated into a new product. For example, candy
wrappers, complete with their logos, are used to bind books, or are
joined together to make backpacks.
"The purpose of TerraCycle is to make things that are
non-recyclable recyclable," CEO Szaky told AFP at the New Jersey
headquarters. Soon they'll be doing chewing gum and dirty diapers,
but Szaky said his "personal favourite" is used
cigarettes.
"It's the ash, the cigarette butt, it's the packaging, everything,"
he said.
"After we launched it in May in Canada, it was so successful, we
collected over a million cigarettes in a short period of time. We
had all these great organizations collecting and the tobacco
industry was so excited that they launched the program in the US,
in Spain."
Expect to see the project spread across Europe and possibly Mexico
in the next four months, Szaky said.
It takes between 1,000 and 2,000 butts to make a plastic ashtray,
and more than 200,000 to make a garden chair. Not that there's any
shortage of supplies: 37 percent of the world's litter is in
cigarette butts, with up to a couple trillion thrown out yearly,
Szaky said.
About 35 million people across 22 countries take part in
TerraCycle's collection programs, which are financed by businesses,
like Old Navy clothing in the United States and Colgate, which
supports the toothbrush collection.
"When we created the cigarette solution, we went to big companies
and showed them plastic made from used cigarettes. They couldn't
believe it and the companies got very engaged," Szaky
said.
"They not only finance the program and pay for all the costs, they
are out here, and are going to do very aggressive
promotion."
Szaky's company began when two people had the idea of harvesting
worm excrement for fertilizer. Now it employs about 100
people.
"I want to solve every kind of garbage that exists," he said, "My
real goal would be that there is no such thing as garbage. Garbage
doesn't exist in nature."