Butt Blitz returns: Montrealers hit the streets to clean up cigarette litter

A Greener Future and UNSMOKE Canada are partnering with Sollicité for their sixth annual Butt Blitz, where volunteers and organizers are getting together to tackle cigarette litter, which according to them makes up one out of five pieces of litter currently on the streets.

The cigarette litter cleanup is starting on St-Marc Street in Montreal’s downtown area for a period of two hours, with three more events scheduled until the end of April 2025 in St-Henri, at Dawson College and finally ending in Lachine.

“I think it’s really important for us to show that we care, that we want to make the city greener and more enjoyable for everybody,” said Stephania Aves, mobilization agent at the Peter McGill Community Table and volunteer at this year’s Butt Blitz cleanup.

Since its inception six years ago, the UNSMOKE Butt Blitz has had more than 2,000 volunteers and more than 5,000 cleanups across Canada.

According to A Greener Future, the UNSMOKE Canada Cleanups is now recognized as the world’s largest cigarette litter cleanup, which has allowed them to expand the program past a simple cleanup effort.

“What we want to do is raise awareness that cigarette butts are bad for the environment and how it’s not a good idea to throw them on the ground,” said Stefania Mustillo, this year’s UNSMOKE Butt Blitz coordinator for Quebec’s Eastern region.

“There’s so many toxins in butts that people don’t realize that they can leach into the soil, leach into water, and another thing too is that a lot of people think that cigarette butts are biodegradable and they’re not, the filters are made out of plastic filament and of course plastic is not biodegradable so it can stay in the environment for a really long time,” she went on to explain.

“I think we really need to do this work to sensibilize and talk to people who smoke,” said Aves. “You can smoke if you want to, but you have to dispose of it at the places that are made for that.”

Longtime downtown homeowner Ann Ross Robinson – who has been involved with projects like Eco-Quartier, which aims to promote environmental citizenship – couldn’t help but come outside and speak with volunteers about the cleanup that was happening in an alleyway right behind her home.

“It touches me because there’s others that care about the environment,” said Ross Robinson, who has also been part of Green Lane since 2012 – another city landscaping eco-project.

Since the start of the cleanup event in 2015, volunteers have collected more than 5.1 million cigarette butts across Canada. For this year’s annual cleanup goal taking place for the rest of April, also known as Earth Day Month, organizers are aiming even higher.

“We want to collect a million cigarette butts across Canada this year,” said Mustillo, “Last year we came really close, we were just above 900,000.”

They eventually reached a million with a few late entries in May, but according to Mustillo, this year they aim to get to a million within the month of April.

And the best part of the cleanup – none of the cigarette butts collected will be going into  a landfill as all of the cigarette butts they are picking up are going to be recycled.

“What happens is they go to TerraCycle [Canada] where all the biodegradable parts of it will be composted and the plastic filament will be recycled into other products,” she said.