The butt stops here for the Bank Street BIA.
To combat cigarette littering in the busy shopping district, the BIA has teamed up with CigBins, Ottawa’s only cigarette-butt collection and recycling service, to pilot the company’s receptacles over the winter months.
The BIA, which covers northern Bank Street from Wellington Street to Gladstone Avenue, will be testing the service from December through February.
There are currently four bins located in the BIA: one near the corner of Bank Street and Laurier Avenue, another at Bank and Gloucester streets, a third close to Barrymore’s Music Hall and one more at Bank and Somerset.
The bins’ compact black and green cylindrical design features an opening big enough for cigarette butts, but are also engineered to ensure no other waste is likely to be dispensed into them.
The area already looks cleaner, says Christine Leadman, executive director of the BIA.
CigBins is a commercial company created by management students at the University of Ottawa. The idea developed out of a social business startup competition a year and a half ago.
Kathleen Kemp, one of the co-founders, says they noticed a lot of cigarette littering on the streets and wanted to find ways to solve the problem and better educate the public.
Cigarette butts are the number one most littered item in the world and the point of CigBins is to provide a value-added service to any property owner combating cigarette-butt litter, says Ajmal Sataar, the other co-founder.
After the butts are collected, they are sent to a storage facility. The plastic filters are recycled into industrial plastic materials and the paper gets composted, he says.
Leadman says part of the BIA’s mandate is to see Bank Street kept cleaner and one of the biggest problems that most areas have is cigarette littering.
Sataar says educating smokers about the negative environmental consequences of their litter is the company’s biggest challenges.
He says CigBins often conducts surveys with smokers and many of them would take the extra seconds to recycle their cigarettes if the opportunity presented itself.
He says his company’s bins, which can hold thousands of cigarette butts, have the CigBins logo and a recycling symbol on them so smokers know to use them.
Leadman says she is a fan of the bins’ clean and eye-catching appearance. The BIA has piloted other types of butt bins before, but people didn’t quite know what they were because of their unusual designs, she says.
“The fact that it has an environmental recycling component as well, I think, is also very appealing to people in general.”
However, she says they will re-evaluate the pilot after the winter to assess the bins’ usage and maintenance reports.
Leadman says she hopes the bins are a success and the BIA will continue to promote them.