Cigarette butts for pancakes sounds like a gimmick, but in the Netherlands it is being used to get people to think twice about litter.

One food truck, the WasteBar, is accepting cigarette butts and other rubbish as payment for poffertjes, small Dutch pancakes usually eaten with butter and sugar, at festivals and events.

At the Het Vrije Westen liberation festival in Amsterdam’s Westerpark this month, the yellow truck carried slogans including “don’t waste waste!”. A nearby sign read: “Betaal hier met zwerfafval” (pay here with litter).

At the WasteBar, 20 cigarette butts buy a plate of poffertjes. Drinks cost 10 butts, while fruit and sweets cost 15. It also accepts plastic, with 15 pieces enough for a poffertje.

Cigarette butts are the most common form of plastic waste in the world, with more than 4.5 trillion produced every year. In the Netherlands, the estimated figure is in the hundreds of millions.

They contain plastic, heavy metals and other toxic substances, and can be very hard to remove from the environment. Dutch municipalities reportedly spend 36 million euros each year cleaning them up.

The scale of the problem has helped spur No Butts Day, an annual event held on the first Saturday of July. It began in the Netherlands and has since grown internationally.

The WasteBar operates year-round at festivals, children’s events and business gatherings. The idea started in Goa, India, in 2019 as part of a campaign by Dutch entrepreneur Noreen van Holstein to tackle litter on beaches.

After 17 years in Goa, van Holstein moved back to the Netherlands in 2020 and decided a similar idea could work there. She folded the bar into a foundation she runs with fellow entrepreneur Lalita van Lamsweerde, and launched the WasteBar food truck in 2022.

“I wasn’t sure whether people would be apprehensive of picking up things from the ground,” van Holstein said. “But immediately from the start, it was just positivity.”

Funded through grants and municipality money, the WasteBar has worked at more than 50 events and collected more than 500,000 cigarette butts. Some were used in an art exhibit last year, while others are waiting to be disposed of properly.

“Right now I have about 100,000 in my garden in a drum,” said van Holstein with a laugh.

She hopes to find a recycling partner this year.

“I do believe that littering can be tackled,” she said, pointing to Singapore and the Nordic countries as places that have kept their cities clean.

She also said the Netherlands had made progress reducing dog poo, but said one truck could not fix the problem by itself.

“Even if we were at 500 events a year, we wouldn’t solve the problem,” she said.

Through the WasteBar, she said she wants to prompt a “mentality change” around litter and encourage children to adopt anti-littering habits.

“We want to get people in action mode, and [hope] that by picking up litter, they would not litter any more, because we believe that once seen, it cannot be unseen,” says van Holstein.

Reint Jan Renes, a behavioural scientist at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences who is not involved with the initiative, said the WasteBar used several methods known to reduce littering and boost environmentally friendly behaviour.

“It turns something abstract like littering into a visible, collective social activity,” he said. “People see others participating, talking about waste, picking up cigarette butts together and contributing to something tangible.

“If enough people begin to associate litter cleanup with civic pride, creativity or community participation rather than punishment or obligation, the initiative may help seed a wider cultural shift.”

Van Holstein said she also sees the WasteBar as a way to promote omdenken, a Dutch word that best translates as “rethinking”.

“People are always used to paying with money, but the moment they pay with something else, that triggers something in someone’s brain,” she said. “By giving something useless like litter value, that makes people look at things differently.”

By the end of the day at the Westerpark festival, children had collected 6,000 cigarette butts, enough for several hundred portions of pancakes.

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