Oak Lawn Environmentalist Dabbles in Unconventional Recycling

Cigarette butts. The phrase reeks of nastiness. To many, they’re dirty, smelly and just plain gross. But with the help of upcycling and recycling company TerraCycle, Oak Lawn resident and environmentalist Rachel Ribich sees their full potential – even if she thinks cigarette butts are kind of gross too.

“People throw them on the ground like they think the world is their trash can,” Ribich says. “I just don’t think people understand the repercussions of littering their cigarette butts. I mean, cigarettes are extremely toxic and they end up in our drinking water, and it’s disgusting.

“I just figured there’s got to be some way that I can help as well, so when I found this program, immediately I jumped on it and I started doing it.”

The program she’s talking about is TerraCycle’s Cigarette Waste Brigade program, which takes cigarette waste and upcycles it to help create plastic shipping pallets, picnic benches and parking curbs. Through this program, Ribich has been recycling her mother’s cigarette butts for almost a year.

“When I saw the cigarette waste (recycling), I thought it was so unique,” Ribich says. “I’d never heard of anything like that before. So I started looking into that and it seemed super-easy. There was really no work to it. You just collect the cigarettes and send them in for free.”

Not only does Ribich send the cigarettes in for free, she also receives points from TerraCycle, which can be redeemed in the form of donations to various charities. According to TerraCycle’s website, the program accepts every part of the cigarette: the filters, the plastic and foil packaging, the ash, the rolling paper, just about everything.

“The only thing they don’t accept is the actual cardboard box, but that’s recyclable through curbside,” Ribich says. “So basically, you’re recycling 100 percent of the cigarette waste.”

Ribich has been finding new ways to live green ever since she began studying interior architecture at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale a few years ago. After graduating two years ago, she returned to Oak Lawn and has continued her quest for sustainability by emphasizing reducing and reusing just a little bit more than recycling.

“Recycling is a great thing,” Ribich says. “It’s better than throwing something in the garbage. Obviously, it’s getting a second life.”

But she adds: “The problem with (recycling) is that it takes a lot of energy to recycle that: a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy. So really, the most important thing that I try to teach people is to reduce your use of things.”

Ribich has been reducing and reusing quite a bit in in her own life: even the box she ships the cigarette waste in is reused from her office’s monthly Lunch’n’Learns. She says she only recycles items when she has no other option, like with her mother’s cigarette butts. Participating in TerraCycle’s recycling program is something unique in many people’s eyes, but to Ribich, it’s just one step closer to her goal of eventually being zero waste.

“When people come up to me at work and say, ‘I was thinking about you today and I brought my reusable water bottle,’ it makes me realize that what I’m doing on some small scale is working,” she says. “Some people think that it’s insignificant, but that small bit that you do makes a difference.”