Cigarette butt litter doesn’t belong on the ground. At the Reynolds American organization, we are aware of the impacts of cigarette litter on the environment and are working on ways to address the issue of butt litter. We collaborate with organizations such as Keep America Beautiful and TerraCycle to help us to address butt litter issues with effective and scalable solutions.
Adult Consumer Behavior
Butt litter is a complex topic which requires the participation of all stakeholders to help drive change. We are committed to working with adult consumers to enhance their understanding of the impact of butt littering and encourage responsible disposal.
Cigarette butt littering is an adult consumer behavior. Research shows that adult consumer education and awareness-raising initiatives are likely to be some of the most successful measures. At the Reynolds American organization, we support a number of such initiatives and education campaigns. We are educating adult consumers on proper waste disposal and recycling through product labeling on 95% of packs in our cigarette product portfolio.
Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, an operating subsidiary of the Reynolds American organization, has distributed butt pouches since 2017 to encourage adult consumer collection of butts. In 2022, retail butt pouches were distributed to 27,000 outlets to promote adult consumer collection and responsible disposal of butts.
Butt Collection and Recycling Partnerships
Our partners, Keep America Beautiful and TerraCycle, are providing adult Keep America Beautiful volunteers across the country the opportunity to collect cigarette butts and send them to TerraCycle, where they are combined with other materials to make useful, Earth-friendly items such as lumber, furniture, containers and more. This is one example of how by working together we can give cigarette butt waste a new life and turn it into something useful again.
Keep America Beautiful’s Cigarette Litter Prevention Program
The partnership between the Reynolds American organization and Keep America Beautiful stretches back to the 1980s. With the Reynolds American organization’s acquisition of Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company in 2002, the partnership strengthened significantly.
Since 2012, Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company has contributed over $3.7 million in partnership with Keep America Beautiful, which operates the nation’s largest program aimed at eliminating cigarette litter and whose Great American Cleanup program returns an average of $100 million in measurable benefits annually across 20,000 communities.
We have been a longtime sponsor— since 2010 —of Keep America Beautiful’s Cigarette Litter Prevention Program, among other sustainability-focused programs related to reducing the environmental impact of our products.
The Reynolds American organization’s goals for partnering with Keep America Beautiful are twofold:
- To promote responsible waste management practices and encourage individuals to take action to protect the environment and preserve it for future generations; and
- To demonstrate the Reynolds American organization’s sustainability practices, which are a strategic business priority for our long-term success.
Through Keep America Beautiful, the Reynolds American organization supports the Cigarette Litter Prevention Program by providing monetary donations to Keep America Beautiful’s affiliates across the country, allowing them to engage in litter prevention activities, including providing receptacle ashtrays, distributing pocket ashtrays, and conducting cigarette litter clean-ups.
Adult consumer awareness about cigarette litter is growing even more quickly than the cigarette smoking rate is declining in the U.S.1 Keep America Beautiful reported a nearly 70 percent decrease in cigarette butt litter from 2009 to 20201.
Public awareness-raising initiatives are an effective way of tackling the issue, and we are committed to continuing our efforts in this area. The Reynolds American organization and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company donations directly fund the Cigarette Litter Prevention Program. The Cigarette Litter Prevention Program is designed to empower community mindset change on proper butt disposal through education and receptacle points. Butts are sent to TerraCycle for recycling.
Communities that have implemented a Cigarette Litter Prevention Program consistently reduce cigarette litter by half based on local measurements taken in the first four to six months after the program is implemented. Through proper disposal, the program aims to educate adult consumers and inspire actions that keep cigarette butts off the ground.
We value working with Keep America Beautiful because the organization helps us to address an important issue with effective and scalable solutions.
Terracycle’s Butt Recycling
Since 2009, the Reynolds American organization has invested more than $12.5 million in cigarette litter education, prevention, cleanup, and recycling through Keep America Beautiful and TerraCycle.
TerraCycle is a company focused on reducing waste and dealing with hard-to-recycle materials, such as cigarette butts. The Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, an operating subsidiary of the Reynolds American organization, has partnered with TerraCycle since 2012 on the Cigarette Waste Recycling Program, which provides adult volunteers across the country the opportunity to collect cigarette butts and send them to TerraCycle, where they are combined with other recyclable materials to make useful, Earth-friendly items such as lumber, furniture, containers and more.
TerraCycle uses a start-with-waste model. Butts have been identified as difficult to recycle material in the Waste Stream. They’ve developed material expertise, understood the material properties, and identified the deconstruction and potential reuse options. TerraCycle utilizes their network of financial partners, processors, manufacturers, and vendors to form partnerships that will execute a through-the-line process that recycles butts into new items.
Material processors take in raw inputs (post-industrial & post-consumer) of cigarette waste for the purpose of processing to meet TerraCycle’s needs. For cigarette butts, this includes extracting the Cellulose Acetate material from the cigarette waste, then processing to a usable format for TerraCycle’s end user base. Residual organic components such as ash, tobacco and paper are separated and composted.
To make the best of the cigarette waste, the Reynolds American organization and Keep America Beautiful continue to collaborate with TerraCycle to keep that litter out of landfills and to recycle it into fertilizers and usable items like park benches.
Employee Cleanups
The Reynolds American organization’s employees volunteer with Keep Winston-Salem Beautiful, a local affiliate of Keep America Beautiful. The Reynolds American organization has adopted three locations in Winston-Salem—a street, a park, and a stream—and works with Keep Winston-Salem Beautiful to conduct clean-ups and beautification activities.
We’re doing our part to inspire action and instill a deeper sense of care for the community that surrounds us. Working through our three adopted sites as part of the Keep Winston-Salem Beautiful program, our employees host at least four clean ups per year in each location. The goal of this work is to motivate others to join the Reynolds American organization’s all-hands-on-deck approach towards environmental and responsible disposal across our operations.
Located at Salem Creek Greenway, Mill Creek, and Reynolds Blvd, employees are invited to join the cause and take full advantage of our volunteerism benefit…which offers each employee two full days to donate their time during working hours every year.
“Environmental preservation programs allow employees within the Reynolds American organization from a variety of functions to gather for the common goal of improving our community’s ecological health and appearance, all while having a great time!” – Chrissy Sherrill, Lead Manager of Regulatory Process & Submissions PMO within the Reynolds American organization
Footnotes:
1 Keep America Beautiful 2020 National Litter Study.
Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) is a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of the global BAT Group and the U.S. parent company of, among others, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company; Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, Inc.; American Snuff Company, LLC; R. J. Reynolds Vapor Company; Modoral Brands Inc.; RAI Services Company; and Reynolds Marketing Services Company. References to “Reynolds,” “Reynolds American,” “we,” “us,” “our”, and “organization” are for convenience and collectively refer to RAI and/or RAI’s independent operating subsidiary companies.
Forward-looking Statements
This document may contain certain forward-looking statements, including “forward-looking” statements made within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are often, but not always, made through the use of words or phrases such as “believe”, “anticipate”, “could”, “may”, “would”, “should”, “intend”, “plan”, “potential”, “predict”, “will”, “expect”, “estimate”, “project”, “positioned”, “strategy”, “outlook”, “target” and similar expressions. These include statements regarding our ESG targets.
All such forward-looking statements involve estimates and assumptions that are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors. It is believed that the expectations reflected in this document are reasonable, but they may be affected by a wide range of variables that could cause actual results and performance to differ materially from those currently anticipated. A review of the reasons why actual results and developments may differ materially from the expectations disclosed or implied within forward-looking statements can be found by referring to the information contained under the headings “Cautionary Statement” and “Group Principal Risks” in the 2023 Annual Report and Form 20-F of British American Tobacco p.l.c. (BAT)
Additional information concerning these and other factors can be found in BAT’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including the Annual Report on Form 20-F and Current Reports on Form 6-K, which may be obtained free of charge at the SEC’s website, https://www.sec.gov/ and BAT’s Annual Reports, which may be obtained free of charge from the BAT website https://www.bat.com/.
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