Des Moines kicks butt in cigarette recycling

• They don't decompose quickly and often wash into waterways, where recent research shows they hinder aquatic species' ability to reproduce and contribute to microplastic pollution in humans.

Catch up quick: TerraCycle is a New Jersey-based company that focuses on materials often discarded after use because reusing or recycling them isn't profitable.

• It has partnerships with hundreds of governments and businesses, including Amazon, and offers the only nationwide free mail-in cigarette waste recycling program in the U.S.
• Operation Downtown, a group that helps keep downtown DSM clean, joined the program in 2022.

How it works: The company provides shipping labels to participants who send up to 50 pounds of cigarette butts at a time to a processing facility in Illinois.

• The filters are mechanically separated from residual paper ash and tobacco, then processed into plastic pellets used for outdoor furniture and industrial pallets.

By the numbers: TerraCycle's tracking over the past nine years shows that Operation Downtown has recycled about 867,000 cigarette butts — the third highest among governments or their municipal partners in the program, spokesperson Eric Ascalon tells Axios.

• Keep New Hanover Beautiful in Wilmington, North Carolina, has recycled nearly 3.2 million cigarettes, and Keep Key West Beautiful has recycled over 1.1 million.

What they're saying: The program supports Operation Downtown's broader cleanliness efforts, executive director Amy Lego tells Axios.

• In the fiscal year that ended in June, Operation Downtown removed almost 679,000 pounds of trash and more than 3,000 graffiti tags, she said.

The bottom line: We clean our butts.