VC Star
By David Goldstein
Feb. 7, 2025
Vandals repeatedly broke locks on cigarette butt containers along the Ventura beach promenade, sometimes dumping out the carefully stored cigarettes and sometimes stealing the entire container.
Adding to the litter prevention program’s woes, a wrong-way driver exiting the nearby parking garage drove onto the promenade and destroyed a bench made from those recycled cigarette butts. The bench was dedicated to the memory of Paul Herzog, a coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation, which collects from those cigarette containers and mails the butts to TerraCycle for recycling.
Nevertheless, the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, undaunted, is expanding its cigarette butt collection program, according to Bill Hickman, the foundation’s senior regional manager for Central California, which includes Ventura County.
“The program started in San Diego in the late 1990s and Ventura County was one of the first to follow,” he said. “Now, we are expanding the program nationwide.”
Juli Marciel, local lead on Surfrider’s “Hold On To Your Butt” and “Rise Above Plastics” programs, said a survey of cigarette butt containers over the next two weeks will yield better data, but containers in Oxnard and Port Hueneme seem almost all intact. In the worst-hit locations, such as a site on Main Street in downtown Ventura, where cans were removed and not replaced due to repeated vandalism, cleanup crews have stepped up work and are sweeping more. Still, some butts inevitably end up in storm drains, which wash out to beaches.
Besides paddling against a tide of vandalism and seeing their bench destroyed, Surfrider volunteers must also overcome a different challenge to their mail-in recycling efforts. When volunteers go to the great effort to consolidate cigarette butts, stuff the butts into prepaid mailers and send the packages to TerraCycle, one criticism argues they are giving a “green sheen” to a product that does not deserve an image of recyclability.
“Sure, that might enable some companies to engage in greenwashing,” said Andy Dosev, a former chairman of the Ventura Surfrider chapter, referring to the term for claiming undeserved environmental credentials. “But this is a way to get to a more renewable economy. This is a grey area. We try to do our best, so we work with organizations like TerraCycle that are doing their best.”
Hickman noted the effort also provides a count of the butts. Such data is sometimes used for legislation. So far, about 865,000 cigarette butts have been mailed in from Ventura County.
TerraCycle, which receives funding from cigarette manufacturers for the prepaid mail-in envelopes, also has sponsors for free recycling of 121 other products. However, few of these subsidies are like cigarettes, covering all brands of a product. Most subsidies pay for free recycling only of specific brands.
Providing an idea of how much manufacturers are paying for this recycling, many unsubsidized mail-in programs are also available through TerraCycle. Disposable plastic cups cost $102 per small shipping box. For $116, you can receive a small box and prepaid return label to have TerraCycle recycle the synthetic polymers from your used chewing gum.
The website also sells products made from the difficult-to-recycle items the company has collected.
A similar company called Trashie began a “Take Back Bag” program last year to recycle textiles. This includes items that are not good enough for thrift stores, such as worn clothes, sneakers, towels and sheets. Trashie offers a new wrinkle in mail-in recycling programs. The company’s textile program offers $30 in “rewards” for every $20 spent on the mail-in bags. Some rewards, such as movie tickets, seem useful. However, examining those discounts, I found it would mostly be $30 in discounts on products I wouldn’t have otherwise bought, and some products seemed overpriced.
Since this program’s revenue comes from eager recyclers rather than from industry sponsors, it makes moot questions of “greenwashing.” As with TerraCycle, Trashie offers a way to recycle items too expensive to recycle though public programs.
David Goldstein, an environmental resource analyst with the Ventura County Public Works Agency, can be reached at 805-658-4312 or david.goldstein@ventura.org.
