BERLIN – Berlin will soon join the growing number of municipalities working to reduce pollution through cigarette butt recycling.
Thanks to a grant, the town has purchased 20 cigarette butt disposal canisters that could be installed as soon as this week. As they’re emptied, butts will be sent to TerraCycle, a company that offers free recycling.
“The beauty of it, it’s not your average butt collector,” said Ivy Wells, the town’s economic and community development director. “There’s a very easy cannister to unlock. We put them in a bag and box and mail them to TerraCycle. They recycle them.”
According to Wells, she applied for a Main Street Improvement grant from the Department of Housing and Community Development in May. She asked for funding to allow the town to buy new trash cans and recycling receptacles as well as butt disposal containers. The town learned it had received a $10,000 grant for the project in the fall.
Wells said the butt containers first caught her eye at a Main Street conference she attended.
“I met the manufacturer and learned about them,” she said.
Cigarette butt recycling has also been in the news, as Ocean City began efforts to collect and recycle butts in 2019. While Berlin doesn’t host the number of people Ocean City does, Wells said there was still a butt pollution problem. Prior to applying for the grant, she walked through town and photographed areas where cigarette butts tended to pile up. Those are the places she plans to have staff install the disposal canisters. Her department and the town’s public works team will coordinate efforts to ensure the canisters are emptied as needed.
“We will make sure it’s done,” she said.
Once the butts are collected, they’ll be mailed to TerraCycle, which provides free shipping and donates a dollar to the Keep America Beautiful Cigarette Litter Prevention Program for every pound of discarded cigarettes collected. According to the company’s website, waste collected through the program is recycled into a variety of industrial products while any remaining tobacco is recycled as compost.
As far as the new trash cans and recycling receptacles, Wells said they were currently under production. The stone colored cans will feature an embedded Berlin logo—the same one found on the town’s wayfinding signs.
“The town logo on these is embedded so it takes longer to produce them,” she said, adding that they’d be installed once they arrived.
