TERRACYCLE NEWS

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Jennette's Pier| Pier educators team up to battle plastics

TerraCycle Include USA cigarette butt recycling
Environmental educators Meredith Fish and Jenna Livernois can’t stand cigarette butts on their beaches. And they despise plastic litter tumbling along dunes, the tideline and public places of Dare County.   After storms, they’ve filled buckets full of plastic debris they’ve found on the beach – things that all too often end up in the sea where they can negatively impact or kill marine life. Year round, they teach visiting public-school students about the environment and how to protect it, and they are always on the lookout for new ways to reduce, reuse and recycle plastics.   This season, visitors to Jennette’s Pier will notice a new and improved recycling center on the south side deck of the pier house. Fish and Livernois put together the Recycle MORE Center over the winter for everyone to use. It was paid for with a grant from the North Carolina Aquarium Society.   Fish, who grew up on the Outer Banks, said the new center is accessible at any time.   “I want everyone to know they can come by and drop off their stuff,” Fish said. She and Livernois also encourage the hundreds of summer campers they teach each week to recycle more.   The new Recycle MORE Center expands the kinds of recyclables Jennette’s already collects, including cigarette butts and monofilament fishing line. Most standard curbside mixed recyclables are accepted in the blue can, Fish said. The bin with the black label collects plastic film, the red is for Solo cups, and yellow is for a variety of things such as fruit squeeze pouches, razor products and packaging, oral care products and small products such as lip balm.   Livernois said plastic film includes Ziploc bags, plastic grocery bags and plastic wrap. “Anything that passes the stretch test but isn’t crunchy sounding,” she said. Plastic wrapping, such as the kind around a case of water or Gatorade, can be taken to your local grocery store, Fish said. “They have so much from their pallets they send it back on their trucks,” Livernois said.   All of the pier’s recyclables are shipped to TerraCycle, the same facility that recycles the cigarette butts collected on the Jennette’s Pier property. The center also has a regular brown can for “regular old trash,” Fish said.