Rabba Fine Foods: Helping Pickup 1 Million Cigarette Butts

A Greener Future has been organizing litter cleanups since 2014, including a program called The Butt Blitz, which focuses specifically on cigarette litter.

Rabba Fine Foods was happy to join volunteers in helping to pick up 3,312,937 cigarette butts over the past 9 years – and we were very excited to be joining them again this year as they tried to top that!

With the help of people all across Toronto, we worked to help pick up 1 million cigarette butts, all on April 1st.

Rabba Community Members and other Volunteers partnered with A Greener Future picked-up cigarette litter everywhere all across the city.

If you helped pick up litter and are looking for a drop-off location, exact drop-off sites can be found on A Greener Future’s website.

Every day approximately 1 million cigarette butts are dropped on the ground in the City of Toronto. They may be small, but they’re toxic and leach chemicals and microplastics into the environment, as well as poison wildlife.

“This will be a world record-breaking event, and we really wouldn’t be able to do it without volunteers from all over the city,” said Rochelle Byrne, Executive Director. The previous butt collection record was set in 2022, with 855,000 cigarette butts being picked up in Paris, France over 3 hours.

After the event, all cigarette butts were transported to Ripley’s Aquarium, where they were to be counted and temporarily displayed. All cigarette litter will then be sent to TerraCycle to be recycled.

We’re excited to hear the results of the cigarette collection – and even if we didn’t break the record, Rabba Fine Foods is happy to be apart of keeping the Toronto streets clean.