Hamiltonians are fighting back against the most littered item in the world, cigarette butts. Today, A Greener Future in collaboration with the City of Hamilton held their 5th annual Butt Blitz.

There is over 6 billion pounds of cigarette litter every single year. They may be small, but they do add up quickly and they are very toxic. Butt Blitz is a program where people pick up cigarette litter is just one of the initiatives that Rochelle Byrne, founder of A Greener Future, has organized to clean up Canada. This year, volunteers targeted the beach and the downtown core.

So we all know that there are toxins in cigarettes, and when they are smoked, that ends up in the filter, and then when the cigarette ends up in water, all those toxins can leech out and that can end up in our drinking water. The filter part is made of a plastic material that will break apart as the butts get washed away into our sewers or storm water system. The plastic will end up in the lake or in the soil but will never fully decompose.

Cigarette butts are one of the most ubiquitous forms of litter. Over 3.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered annually across the globe. One of the biggest problems is that people do not have enough cigarette waste reciprocals, convenient enough for them to put their cigarettes out. So if you can not find one, you can always purchase a disposable one. It has got a metal inside for you to put your cigarette out, store it, and eventually send it to a company like Terracycle.

Terracycle is a global company that offers recycling solutions for almost every form of waste. They turn cigarette butts into industrial skids.

Rochelle Byrne is tallying the numbers, she says that Hamilton, today alone, in just two hours, collected well over 35,000 cigarette butts. The effort of roughly 35 volunteers.