Prowling the shore, a large plastic bag in hand, 26-year old Julian Melcer treats every day like Earth Day, picking up cigarette butts at Tel Aviv's beaches and selling small pouches he calls pocket ashtrays to smokers to deter them from littering.
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"I'm here to protect the world," he said. "It's burning in my soul, it's burning in my bones, it's burning in my eyes when I see trash on the beach."
Melcer said his environmental campaign is also his source of income, earning him about $3,000 to $4,000 a month during the summer from the sale of the pocket ashtrays for $6 each.
The Tel Aviv resident has been at it for three years, starting out by creating artwork from butts he collected and then finding a way to recycle his large haul.
Stuffing butt-filled plastic bags into boxes, Melcer mails them to the NoButts organization in Ireland, which recycles cigarette waste by extracting their plastic filters for repurposing.
On its website, NoButts says cigarette filters are the "most toxic single-use plastic on the planet." It estimates that some six trillion butts are littered worldwide every year.
Melcer estimates that he and others in his volunteer group have picked up about one million butts.
"It's super important because cigarettes hurt nature, they hurt the beach, and I love the beach – it's my home," Melcer said about his campaign.
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