TerraCycle Inc. Targets Cigarette Waste

As the fight against littering — and ruining the environment in general — becomes more and more of a concern that the entire world has taken up, we’re finding increasingly creative and important ways to recycle the things that we really should be recycling. We’ve been really trying to do a lot to make sure that we’re protecting the planet in an important way, as many of us seem to be realizing that our current patterns of consumption are not putting us on a course that might be considered sustainable for too much longer in the future. Everyone seems to have realized that we need to be figuring out more sustainable and more intelligent ways to do the things that we need to do in our day-to-day lives. There is a way to go about living that has less of an impact, and it’s a wonderful thing to see that more and more individuals and groups are dedicating themselves to figuring out how this can be done.

Recycling is a huge part of this effort, and the more efforts being made towards it, the better we get at doing it successfully. One of the most recent developments in this effort has been made by TerraCycle. This company is one that was created with the specific purpose of finding ways to recycle things that aren’t easily recycled to begin with. Ever since the idea of recycling has been introduced, we’ve fallen in love with putting things like newspapers, bottles, and cans into special bins so that we can make them into other things. Recently, however, we’ve been figuring out how to recycle other things, and TerraCycle is at the forefront of these efforts.

Recently, TerraCycle has fixed its focus on the waste left by the consumption of cigars and cigarettes. These butts — from cigarettes in particular — actually account for more than 38% of all the trash on roadsides across the United States. They’re easily the item that gets littered the most, and across the whole world they account for nearly two billion pounds of waste. That’s a lot of trash, so TerraCycle has smartly joined forces with Santa Fe Tobacco to develop a way to really beef up recycling efforts aimed at this specific problem. The program that the two companies have created involves the production of prepaid shipping labels which can be given to groups that will pick up discarded cigarette butts. The shipping labels will allow these groups to send the waste to TerraCycle facilities which will then turn them into something a lot more useful.

It’s great to see companies like TerraCycle and corporations like Santa Fe Tobacco working together to create prospects for a better future where we recycle more and live more efficiently. Hopefully this kind of thing will continue to become more and more popular so that we can continue to live with less of an impact on our environment. With this kind of corporate synergy, it’s definitely looking good.