More on cigarette butt recycling

San Diego's Curtis Baffico shows the original 700-plus cigarette butts he collected in 30 minutes that inspired him to launch the Butt Redemption Value program.

What if all these cigarette butts had a value? What if you could trade them in for cash? Would they then disappear from streets, beaches and parks?

Curtis Baffico, a San Diego stock trader who moonlights as an environmentalist, asked himself these questions and decided to create a recycling system to try to answer them. Baffico raises money on his website, Ripplelife.org, then pays out a “Butt Redemption Value” of $3/pound for whatever cigarette ends people collect and turn in at monthly collection events.

It takes roughly 1,500 cigarette butts to add up to a pound, Baffico says, and he admits that $3 isn’t a lot of compensation for the effort required to pick them up. Still, at the first event, held in January in San Diego’s Pacific Beach, Baffico and other volunteers collected 11,250 cigarette butts. A second event netted 26,000.

But whatever can you recycle them into?

Baffico hopes to repurpose every butt he collects, insuring that it never sees a landfill. One of his recycling ideas: Grind up the butts and add them to concrete, replacing fibermesh, an anti-cracking agent that is often added to concrete and usually made from polypropylene. The thought is that the concrete would surround the butts — for instance, in a slab foundation — and keep their toxins from leaching into the environment.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/environment/can-cigarette-butts-be-recycled-32091/