Translator: David DeRuwe
I’m Marcos Poiato, the director and president of Poiato Recicla,
Brazil’s first cigarette recycling plant
and the only one in the world with a registered patent.
This makes a lot of difference
when we’re talking about an environmental enterprise.
Well, it seems like working with issues of sustainability is a crazy thing to do
and crazier still when we decide to recycle cigarette butts.
But all this has a purpose, right?
Why?
When we began our activities in 2010,
in all our research,
we never found and, until today, we have difficulty finding
another operation that deals with this,
because, really, when we’re talking about society and cigarettes,
what comes to mind is helping people to stop smoking,
which, of course, is what we all should do
because of all the health impacts we know are caused by smoking.
But what we also need to do
is extend our consideration concerning cigarettes
to what happens after they’re consumed,
society’s customary habit of smoking
and discarding cigarettes into the environment -
sidewalks, streets, gardens, beaches, seas, and oceans.
According to the United Nations, the residue or waste most encountered
on streets and sidewalks, and in seas and oceans,
is what we call the cigarette butt, and it comes with an aggravation:
cigarettes contain more than 7,000 toxic substances.
Worse still, it’s the famous invisible waste.
Everyone sees people throw them; everyone steps on them.
But ... what’s the solution?
So we at Poiato Recicla, after witnessing these problems,
decided to go after a solution.
It seems like stubborness, but we’re happy today,
to be participating in an event of such relevance, Pre-COP26,
and we’re here to talk about the significant results
we’ve already experienced -
more than 80 million collected and recycled cigarette butts.
More importantly,
we don’t sweep the street, and we don’t pick butts off the ground.
We work within an environmental education process
where we, through public speaking, public interaction, and art workshops,
promote socio-educational action
to make citizen cigarette users aware
of how to dispose cigarettes properly in our collectors.
With this, we manage to make the collection,
issue a report or certification to our business partners
and city halls that already work in this area,
and thereby show the impact caused by cigarette butts.
More than that, we take all this collected material
to our plant in the city of Votorantim,
the first cigarette recycling plant in Brazil,
and there, using innovative technology developed by the University of Brasília,
we’re able to transform cigarette butts
into art and craft paper.
Through a physicochemical process,
we extract all the toxicity,
take away all the odor,
and transform this material into a cellulose mass.
And look how interesting:
this cellulose mass product, later, through other partners
is forwarded to charitable institutions
in various regions of Brazil,
where we can carry out inclusion and income work with these entities.
Therapies are made,
and here are two very important examples for us.
The first of these
is “Instituto Cândido Ferreira,” in Campinas,
which is an institute that provides mental health care
in the city of Campinas,
and with whom we’ve had a partnership for more than four years,
where Cândido Ferreira’s beneficiaries, upon receiving this material,
participate in therapeutic workshops
and, later, they produce materials
to be sold in the workshops’ warehouse,
which is the store that resells the materials produced by the institution.
It’s worth knowing about.
Another reference for us
is the work that we do in the city of Ilhabela,
where cigarette butts are collected
and educational work is encouraged in schools,
in actions on beaches, and community actions in Ilhabela.
After we collect, we return this material to the city,
so work can be carried out.
So in the city’s schools, together with the city’s artisans
particularly, in the Apae art workshop in Ilhabela,
which also produces materials and resells them in its workshops.
You can see that this work
doesn’t only have an environmental or public health aspect.
It also has an economic development aspect
because we generate employment and we promote education.
So we work on environmental education,
and we also encourage inclusive work
carried out by principal charities spread across our country.
So we believe we can contribute to a change in behavior,
and with impact reduction,
not only from reducing cigarette butts but also using cigarette waste
as an example of a waste that’s not seen by society,
and this issue can reflect
on all the other types of wastes or residues that could be reused,
as long as we’re aware of taking the correct route.
So, on our part, from Poiato Recicla, we are very honored and happy
with this opportunity to be present at an event of this importance,
such as Pre-COP26,
and to be able, hopefully, to expand these actions worldwide,
because the impact of cigarette butts is not a peculiarity of Brazil.
All over the world, people smoke,
and unfortunately, they throw the butts on the ground.
The solution? We already have it.
We just need to expand it to all the world.