A three-hour single-day clean up event has rid Hamilton of tens of thousands of cigarette butts in the city’s downtown core.
Saturday’s ‘Butt Blitz’ was an affair tied to a prevention program launched this past week, aimed at reducing cigarette litter across the city.
Individual volunteers armed with supply bags and gloves spread out around the city’s lower end to pick up butts in that neighbourhood.
Upon completion of the event, the city claimed volunteers had picked up 37,052 cigarette butts.
READ MORE: City of Hamilton launches battle against cigarette butts
A month-long campaign to take cigarette garbage off Ontario streets was launched at the beginning of April with environmental preservation volunteer group A Greener Future behind the initiative.
To date, the group claims to have picked up 772,368 cigarette butts off streets in six provinces across Canada since starting the program in 2015.
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Cigarette filters are made from a non-biodegradable plastic and are considered pollution. A Greener Future says the butts are toxic and pose a threat to domestic animals and wildlife, like dogs and fish who can mistake the ends as food.
Cigarette butts picked up by volunteers in Hamilton on Saturday will be sent to TerraCycle Canada for recycling. The plastics inside the waste can be separated by composition and melted into hard plastic that can make new recycled industrial products, such as plastic pallets.