Reading the post from @DeniGu about5 easy ways you can help the environment on Google Maps, and thinking about initiatives to try to help the environment, I realized I never wrote about a very interesting meet-up I organized last year in Buenos Aires, related to environmental care: LGCTH: Cigarette Butt Collection Campaign.
As you know, April 22 of this month is Earth Day, so I think it’s a good time to tell you about what we did on that meet-up, to try to inspire others to take these initiatives into practice in conmemoration of such important date for our planet.
IMPORTANT: I want to clarify something that arised after reading some comments in the published post. This meet-up was not against people who smoke, nor to talk about what the cigarette provokes on people’s health. This was related only on how to dispose correctly the cigarette butts. The message was… do not throw it in the streets, cigarette butts must be disposed with the non recycling garbage. So, if you smoke, feel free to comment the post. 
A bit of background
Let me tell you first, that more than a year ago, interested in learning more about how to take better care of the planet, I joined a local community of volunteers, interested in ecology, called Green Ambassadors. This is a non profit community that tries to promote all kind of initiatives to care for the environment, such as bicycle rides, awareness campaigns, training on environmental issues, etc.
For quite some time, I wanted to join the two beautiful communities of which I am part (Local Guides and Green Ambassadors), so, inspired by the Local Guides Cleand the Worldinitiative from my friend and great environmentalist @ErmesT , the idea to organize this meet-up came up
In addition to telling you what we did that day, I would also like to tell you a little about the backstage and what the experience of organizing everything was like, in case one day you want to do a meeting like this and don’t know where to start.
The Idea
Organizing this meet-up was one of the most fun and challenging activities I’ve done so far. Luckily, I had the help of a lot of people who participated in the organization, since a small idea of collecting cigarette butts ended up in a very large event with a lot of people involved. It was so exciting!
One day, I was in an Ambassador’s meeting, when I had the opportunity to tell about my experience organizing First Local Guides Clean The World meet-up in Buenos Aires. They were very interested and made a lot of interesting questions and comments. In the same event, another ambassador commented on her concern about cigarette butts and about a homemade cigarette holder that she installed near a clinic. And so simple as that… The idea came up! Why not host a Local Guides Clean the World meet-up to collect cigarette butts in conjunction with the city’s Community of Green Ambassadors?
The first question that arose to me was if this kind of meet-ups would be included in Local Guides Clean The World initiative, mainly because it is more oriented on plastics. I contacted Ermes and he agreed that it suited the initiative. So…Subject solved and we had a meet-up going on!
The cigarette butt problem
The next step was to do some research on the problem of cigarette butts.
Among many other things, I learned something that really shocked me: Cigarette butts are the biggest cause of litter in the world, with about 5 TRILLION butts thrown on the ground each year!
Although they are very small objects, they are highly polluting since they are made up of a large amount of chemical products. When a cigarette butt is thrown on the ground, the sun and the rain end up breaking down the cover, and all those chemicals end up filtering into the groundwater and rivers and contaminating no less than 50 liters of water EACH OF THEM! They are objects that due to their small size, generally at first glance, do not cause a great feeling of dirt, since they are hardly seen when we talk about large areas such as sidewalks or parks, but when the collection begins, one realizes the huge amounts that are dumped really anywhere.
But what can be done with the cigarette butts?
The first thing I did was to find out what could be done with the butts once they were collected. As a proposal for this waste, the city of Buenos Aires said that instead of throwing them on sidewalks, they must be thrown in black waste containers with the rest of non recycling garbage. Since the cigarette buts, by nature, contain lots of pollutants and the places where it is finally deposited are already highly contaminated, you can avoid contaminating new places.
That was the official alternative, however it didn’t seem like enough so I kept looking and a much better idea came up! One of the green ambassadors who volunteered to help me organize, had heard about Recycling Project and it became the perfect solution.
Recycling Project is an environmental organization that formed a company dedicated to recycling cigarette butts to make bricks for construction with the resulting polymer. The idea was very interesting and surpassed the city’s proposal! And best of all, we were told that this company has volunteers in different provinces, who receive the cigarette butts that people want to send them. We got in touch with the volunteer in Buenos Aires and she was delighted to participate and receive whatever we could collect that day.
How to generate awareness with the meet-up?
One of the main goals of the LGCTW campaign is to raise awareness and inspire others to care for the planet, so just a few people collecting cigarette butts didn’t seem like it would meet the awareness goal.
It had to be made more visible and that is how the idea of contacting the City’s Green Spaces and Recycling Area came up.
After many steps (which were not easy), we obtained approval to have a a plotted van that was going to accompany us that day. And even better, that van was going to carry a stand for receiving recyclables that would attract people’s attention, as well as microphones and speakers and shirtfronts to identify us…
Another great idea came from one of the people who offered help in the organization. The day of the event we could have a workshop on portable cigarette butt holders made with tetra brik, to teach people how to make them and, incidentally, have some to give to the people during the campaign. Many people joined and in a short time, we had a lot of beautiful portable cigarette butt holders to deliver.
But to my understanding, the best idea came from the Local Guide @Maximilianozalazar who proposed a very creative and fun idea that helped us a lot to make the event very visible that day.He built himself a cigarette costume and set out to be our “living cigarette” on the day of the event. Wasn’t this a great idea?
The day of the event
The day of the event, we arrived very early and started to put everything together. We choosed a very sunny day and the selected place was a big park in the center of Buenos Aires City (Bosques de Palermo), where people used to go with the family to enjoy the fresh air.
The event started with a short talk to those present, explaining the problem of the cigarette butts and everything that we had found out during our investigation.
Once the talk was over, one group began to talk to the people passing by to try to generate awareness, while another large group began the collection and another one started the cigarette butt holder workshop…
People from all ages participated!
We really had a lot of fun and got to talk to a lot of people who took to their homes their beautiful portable cigarette butt holders and a lot of new information on the subject.
But the best of all, was that in just one morning WE MANAGED TO COLLECT 21,792 CIGARETTE BUTTS, THUS SAVING 1,089,600 LITERS OF WATER. Isn’t it amazing?
I would like to thank all who participated in this meet-up and let you know that if you want to host an event like this, and have any doubts, please contact me and I would be happy to help you and give you tips and more details.
Please let me know in the comments if you liked this meet-up and if you have any other ideas that would help to improve this kind of event. I’m planning to host another LGCTW meet-up for Earth Day this year, so all ideas will be very helpful. Stay tuned to know more about that in the following days!
Thank you so much for reading!
Ceci
PD: If you are wondering who is our living cigarette, please let me introduce him to you: 
, y lo más importante: a 
, he visto algunos cubiertos hechos con materiales reciclados pero no los de aguacate, esteré al pendiente por si se me cruzan, aunque igual en muchos lados ya dejaron de utilizar plásticos, afortunadamente.
