On a single day in May 2022, a Belfast group and student volunteers collected more than 120,000 discarded cigarette butts from city streets in an effort to reduce toxic litter.
The Belfast Bay Watershed Coalition launched its Butts Be Gone campaign in 2019 to combat cigarette butt littering in Belfast. They’ve spent the past three years picking up cigarette butts off the streets and installing disposal containers. The group has also recycled an estimated 15,418 butts since launching the initiative.
The estimates are based on how full the containers are when emptied. Each one can hold up to 600 cigarette butts. The weight of the bags is also used in the estimate.
Studies show cigarette butts are the most common type of marine litter. Their toxins and microplastics pose ecological risks to fish, marine bacterium, water fleas and other marine life. Cigarette butts easily end up in waterways, especially in areas like Belfast where rain can wash litter down the hills or into storm drains that flow into the bay, according to Susan Connolly, a Belfast Bay Watershed Coalition member.
Connolly and other members of the Butts Be Gone team are working to change that.
Each month, Connolly empties the 14 cigarette butt disposal canisters — also known as butlers — the coalition installed across downtown Belfast. Those butlers can hold up to 600 cigarette butts at a time – and Connolly said they frequently fill up. Other members go into downtown Belfast to pick up butts left on the ground.
The butlers collected over 95,000 cigarettes in 2020, the first year they were installed, Connolly said. From the start, the coalition worked with nonprofit TerraCycle to recycle that waste into new plastic products.
Connolly said the campaign members are more focused on combating littering than smoking.
“If you’re smoking, you’re smoking. We’re just trying to figure out a way to make it easier for people to do the right thing,” she said.
Susan’s husband, Kevin Connolly, said the coalition has since heard from Belfast residents who smoke at home and don’t know what to do with that trash.
“They want to help, too. They want to get rid of their butts, have them be useful for something if they’re going to smoke,” Susan Connolly said.
To give local smokers that opportunity to help, the coalition placed a container at the Belfast Transfer Station in October to collect the cigarette butts on a larger scale.
Residents can find an old refrigerator with the label “butts” — which coalition members are eagerly planning to replace with a larger, more obvious magnet this week. The broken refrigerator, found at the transfer station, is to keep the butts dry in a sealed container.
It hasn’t been easy-goings for the Butts Be Gone team. Susan Connolly doesn’t relish touching something that was in someone else’s mouth, for instance.
It can also be disheartening to have to continuously pick up the litter when there are butlers all around town, coalition member Marianne McKinney said.
Kevin Connolly said he’s gone to clear out butlers and found butts littered just below it, which he’s wondered might be a sign of backlash.
But, McKinney added, it’s worth the payoff. She hasn’t seen any litter in the garden outside of the public restrooms on Front Street since the coalition installed a butler there.
“To see a clean street, each time it gets a little better,” she said.
