Please join The City of New Orleans and the Downtown Development District (DDD) as we launch a new pilot program to collect and recycle cigarette butts, with the goal of keeping New Orleans streets cleaner. The official launch will take place Tuesday, July 22 at 10am at the corner of Lafayette St. and Tchoupitoulas St.
The New Orleans pilot program is an extension of TerraCycle’s Cigarette Waste Brigade a nationwide, mail-in recycling program that is sponsored by Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company. New Orleans is the first city in the United States to implement a city-wide collection system, with the installation of 50 new cigarette-recycling receptacles on several blocks in Downtown. The receptacles will be easily identified with stickers that say “Recycle Your Butts Here.” The DDD Clean Team will service the citywide cigarette butt collection units.
Cigarette butts are the world’s most pervasive form of litter. Keep America Beautiful estimates that 38% of all roadside litter in the U.S. is tobacco-related waste. An estimated 195 million pounds of cigarette butts are improperly discarded in the United States annually. Globally, an estimated 3.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered every year.