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Recycling hero makes big haul of Williams Lake butts

Williams Lake super volunteer picks up 100 pounds of cigarette butt left behind as litter

Wilber Saunders is showing Williams Lakers their butts.

Cigarette butts, that is. Saunders, known for his incredible work cleaning up litter across the community for over a decade, carefully sorts the waste he picks up, recycling as much as he can. Saunders spends time most days collecting garbage he finds along the roadways and in parking lots and other spots during the snow-free months of the year.

After sorting it all, he was recently packing up and shipping around 100 pounds of cigarette butts, thanks to a partnership with the Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society (CCCS).

"I get around a five-gallon pail a month," said Saunders, adding some of his hot spots include the Stampede Grounds after the Williams Lake Stampede and the Tim Horton's Drive Thru. Living in the Dog Creek Area, he said he often collects along the Dog Creek Road, where he finds two to three butts every couple of feet. 

After he fills a pail, Saunders stacks it up on top of the others he has collected, weighing them down and allowing them to compress one another to fit as much as he can. 

"They were jam-packed," said Saunders, of the stack he had from the past year. He had been collecting garbage and recycling the items he could for many years before he became aware of the possibility of recycling cigarette butts.

Oliver Berger, a waste-wise educator with the CCCS, said it was the second time Saunders had collected such a haul, with last year being the first time the group had been able to collaborate with the "butt champion" as Berger dubbed Saunders in the video post he made about the recovered waste.

"It's absolutely unbelievable," said Berger.

Berger posted a short video of the bags and bags of butts to help educate the community about the work Saunders does to clean up the toxic leftovers of smoking filtered cigarettes.

Berger points out the abundant butts are made of plastic and can be full of harmful chemicals.

According to the United States' National Institute of Health, cigarette butts are the most common form of litter and contain a range of toxic carcinogens including arsenic, heavy metals and nicotine. Leaving butts on the ground means they are leaching out chemicals into the soil and water.

Thanks to the CCCS partnering with Brain Garden and TerraCycle, they are able to help Saunders send back the butts he collects and separates out for recycling. This then provides a few dollars in revenue for those organizations to not only deal with the waste and pollution, but also support education programs around preventing forest fires caused by cigarettes and education on the toxic pollutants butts contain.

While Berger applauds the work Saunders is doing, he also appeals to smokers to help out by dealing with their own waste, either by choosing filter-free cigarettes or saving their own butts and recycling them, rather than making work for a volunteer like Saunders.

"You can do better," said Berger in his post. "Let's not leave this up to one person to fix."

For his part, Saunders said where the butts are common, he'd like to see businesses provide collection points to help the process and keep the environment cleaner.

One of his big concerns is the microplastics resulting from the breaking up of so many of the plastics he sees left as garbage, from butts, wrappers, single use coffee cups (which are plastic-lined) and other single-use plastics.

"It's going into our environment ... it's going into our watersheds," he said, noting he's not doing all this work for himself, as he will be 80 next month.

"It's for the next generation."



Ruth Lloyd

About the Author: Ruth Lloyd

I moved back to my hometown of Williams Lake after living away and joined the amazing team at the Williams Lake Tribune in 2021.
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