Hoping to turn butts into bucks

Entrepreneurs hope smokers’ guilt lets idea catch fire

The four entrepreneurs are hoping to clean up, in more ways than one, as they take unwanted cigarette butts and turn them into profits.

At least, that’s the plan. The venture is still at the idea stage, but a six-minute pitch on the idea won top honours over the weekend at Launch Some Good, an entrepreneurial competition with a world-betterment twist.

Structured as something of a cross between Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice, Launch Some Good took 25 socially conscious would-be entrepreneurs on Friday night and gave them just under 48 hours to sort themselves into five groups and plan out a venture that would improve life on Earth while earning revenue.

The event was put on by Hub Ottawa, a for-profit company that provides working space and a collaborative atmosphere for entrepreneurs.

The future cigarette butt barons, Ajmal Sataar, Kathleen Kemp, Adam Tomaszewski and Neil Gangal — ages 20 to 22 — told the panel of judges late Sunday afternoon that discarded butts are a blight on the city, not only visually but environmentally.

The group plans to create specialized cigarette collection bins and sell a collection service. For extra world-improvement points, the collection jobs will be held by mentally ill people through transitional employment programs.

Options for unloading the butts include turning them into insulation or giving them to a company in New Jersey that makes furniture from them.

The company also hopes to create a revenue stream from advertising on its butt containers. In order to stimulate public interest, those containers would automatically count the number of butts going in and would be operated on solar power, the group says.

How many of these bells and whistles will end up in the final plan they don’t yet know, but Sataar says they are excited about the idea.

“We have a passion for social enterprise,” he said.

Cigarettes might not seem like a growth industry, but Sataar says at the moment butts are still the world’s most common type of litter, so there should be plenty of business to do.

There’s also the question of how big a priority such environmentalism will be for smokers, but they’re hoping smokers’ guilt will be a powerful force.

The runner-up in the competition was a group that hoped to create a not-forprofit organization to help address youth unemployment. The concept, which they called Camp-in-a-Box, would mentor and train teenagers and young adults to run children’s parties and “kid zones” at festivals.

The training aspect would require a small amount of government funding, they said, but most revenue would come from fees for their services.

The other pitches included one that would create a phone app that uses crowd sourcing to give real-time information on wait times in Ottawa Hospitals; a plan to use QR codes (a type of bar code) placed on buildings to tell Ottawa stories; and a plan to use financial planners to help increase financial literacy among lower income people.