Cigarette butts are everywhere - clogging up our streets, littering our beaches - and for decades they've been thought of as 'unrecyclable', because they contain such a tightly packed mix of organic and inorganic products that recycling companies can't deal with them.
But a New Jersey-based company has taken on the challenge, and has come up with a way to recycle millions of cigarette butts and turn them into industrial plastic products, such as shipping pallets, railway sleepers, and even ashtrays.
The company is called TerraCycle, and its aim is to take items that people normally consider impossible to recycle, and then use science to figure out a way to do just that.
Since launching in the early 2000s, they now have more than 7,000 cigarette recycling bins in nine countries around the world, including the US, UK, and Australia, and people can also send their old cigarette butts in for free to have them recycled.
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