eco-conscious and earth-friendly, but sometimes your kids don't always buy the coolness factor. Drive the message home with recycled candy wrapper Eco Boomboxes from Fashionation <http://www.merkuryinnovations.com/product_center.asp?pagenum=2&parent_id=100001&dept_id=100120> . Two lucky Chicago Parent readers will win a Skittles boom box, worth $19.95. The speakers are universally compatible and battery free. Finally, they'll agree with you, being green can be cool.

Earth Month is one time of the year when a number of companies come up with initiatives as well as project to showcase their efforts to preserve the environment and protect the ecology. One of the companies that have taken the lead in this is the retail giant Wal-Mart, which has tied up with Terracycle to display ‘before and after’ products. This is in the realm of recycling which is one of the key ways to conserve the environment. These products will be displayed all month on Wal-Mart shelves. These are essentially products that are taken by Terracycle and then recycled into fresh consumer goods.

TerraCycle is a company known for eco-innovation. They take trash and upcycle it into great, green goods like backpacks, notebooks, folders, tote bags, wallets and pencil cases along with yard and garden products. Now they are creating a line of eco-gadgets under the Eco-Nation sub brand. "Eco-nation is staying ahead of the fashion curve with a conscience: big impact on your gadgets, small impact on the planet." These new green gadgets will help you "groove greener". The TerraCycle Eco-Nation gadgets start out as candy wrappers from M&Ms, Skittles, Starburst and other candies and get transformed or "upcycled" into awesome speakers and boomboxes. These handy upcycled speakers come as flat, folded cardboard that you fold into a boombox or set of speakers and attach to your iPod  or other mp3 player. The speakers and boombox run off the mp3 power supply so they need no batteries.

As part of a new collaboration, a handful of residents is turning trash into cash. It's an effort to go green while getting green. Gloria Gilbert, founder of the Westford Farmer's Market, recently launched Sustainable Westford -- a nonprofit platform created to organize local groups with the common goal of promoting green initiatives. "There are many groups covering a range of topics including water pollution, organic farming to alternative energy however there is not one platform. They're spread out all over the place," Gilbert said. "I wanted to partner with local programs with the same mission as ours -- to create an eco-friendly and vibrant Westford." One of the first programs Gilbert teamed up with in town is Upcycle It! created by fellow resident Kristina Greene. The initiative collects non-recyclable items such as chip bags, candy-bar wrappers, coffee bags and juice pouches in a number of drop-off bins around town. The bins are collected weekly and then sent to Terracycle, an international company that takes the "trash" and makes it into a number of products. Skittles wrappers become an insulated cooler tote bag. Crushed computers and fax machines are morphed into flower pots. Circuit boards are reused as clipboards and drink coasters. Oreo Cookie packaging is transformed into a kite and much more. The innovative "recycling" is not the only benefit to Westford. Each piece of trash that's collected and sent in is worth anywhere from two cents for chip bags to 25 cents for cell phones. All the money Greene collects from Upcycle It! is then donated back to Westford schools.

As part of a new collaboration, a handful of residents is turning trash into cash. It's an effort to go green while getting green. One of the first programs Gilbert teamed up with in town is Upcycle It! created by fellow resident Kristina Greene. The initiative collects non-recyclable items such as chip bags, candy-bar wrappers, coffee bags and juice pouches in a number of drop-off bins around town. The bins are collected weekly and then sent to Terracycle, an international company that takes the "trash" and makes it into a number of products. Skittles wrappers become an insulated cooler tote bag. Crushed computers and fax machines are morphed into flower pots. Circuit boards are reused as clipboards and drink coasters. Oreo Cookie packaging is transformed into a kite and much more. The innovative "recycling" is not the only benefit to Westford. Each piece of trash that's collected and sent in is worth anywhere from two cents for chip bags to 25 cents for cell phones. All the money Greene collects from Upcycle It! is then donated back to Westford schools.

Eco Boombox Skittles : Another product made by TerraCycle. As reported on its website, "Upcycling takes unused rolls of wrapping material that would otherwise go to waste, and turns it into a variety of useful, eco-friendly products

A whole bunch of brand new TerraCycle items will be available, during April for a limited time only, at every single Walmart across the country. Starting April 5th, nearly 60 TerraCycle products will be sold right next to the original items they were made from. Cheetos kites and tote bags made from Frito-Lay wrappers will be sold with bags of Frito-Lay chips, while notebooks and purses made out of skittles and M&M wrappers will be sold right next to bags of Mars Candy!

As a special promotion in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day this month, Walmart will be featuring over 60 TerraCycle product including some new ones in their stores across the country.  The promotion will only last through April 29th, so go check out the products at Walmart.

From their classrooms to store shelves, Fort Myers schools are learning how waste can be reused instead of discarded. With hundreds of students eating lunch everyday, the teachers at several area schools - St. Michael Lutheran, Orangewood Elementary and Colonial Elementary - used to see a lot of used drink pouches get thrown away.

TerraCycle collects waste which is normally non-recyclable, such as candy wrappers, chip bags, and juice pouches, and makes hundreds of eco-friendly products with them. This year, almost 60 of the company’s products will be sold in evert Walmart store across the US for the month of April, exposing millions of customers to these unique items, and perhaps sparking some conversations about the life cycle of products and packaging.