LONG BEACH - It's the end of lunchtime at Longfellow Elementary School and students are lining up behind purple recycling bins to sort their trash. The bins are divided into six categories: energy bar wrappers, chip bags, plastic bags, city recycling, juice pouches and cookie wrappers. "I like that we recycle in our school because it's good for the planet," said 6-year-old Jenna Jacob, as she recycled her cookie wrapper. For students at Longfellow Elementary at 3800 Olive Ave. in North Long Beach, recycling is more than a lunchtime activity; it's a way of life, said Principal Laurie Murrin. "It's become part our campus culture," she said.

LONG BEACH - It's the end of lunchtime at Longfellow Elementary School and students are lining up behind purple recycling bins to sort their trash. The bins are divided into six categories: energy bar wrappers, chip bags, plastic bags, city recycling, juice pouches and cookie wrappers. "I like that we recycle in our school because it's good for the planet," said 6-year-old Jenna Jacob, as she recycled her cookie wrapper. For students at Longfellow Elementary at 3800 Olive Ave. in North Long Beach, recycling is more than a lunchtime activity; it's a way of life, said Principal Laurie Murrin. "It's become part our campus culture," she said.

LONG BEACH - It's the end of lunchtime at Longfellow Elementary School and students are lining up behind purple recycling bins to sort their trash. The bins are divided into six categories: energy bar wrappers, chip bags, plastic bags, city recycling, juice pouches and cookie wrappers. "I like that we recycle in our school because it's good for the planet," said 6-year-old Jenna Jacob, as she recycled her cookie wrapper. For students at Longfellow Elementary at 3800 Olive Ave. in North Long Beach, recycling is more than a lunchtime activity; it's a way of life, said Principal Laurie Murrin. "It's become part our campus culture," she said.

LONG BEACH - It's the end of lunchtime at Longfellow Elementary School and students are lining up behind purple recycling bins to sort their trash. The bins are divided into six categories: energy bar wrappers, chip bags, plastic bags, city recycling, juice pouches and cookie wrappers. "I like that we recycle in our school because it's good for the planet," said 6-year-old Jenna Jacob, as she recycled her cookie wrapper. For students at Longfellow Elementary at 3800 Olive Ave. in North Long Beach, recycling is more than a lunchtime activity; it's a way of life, said Principal Laurie Murrin. "It's become part our campus culture," she said.

Every Friday, her third graders collect empty Capri Sun packages from the other classrooms in the elementary school, clean them and prepare them for mailing to TerraCycle. The juice boxes return to useful life as backpacks and pencil cases. Upcycling is the lesson Dabrowka’s students learn from their routine, plus math as they chart each week’s collection. Dabrowka’s classroom radiates with environmental awareness. “We try to use natural light as much as possible, so the students chart the days that we don’t use lights,” she says. “By the end of the year, we have an analysis of how much electricity we have saved over an entire year. The kids don’t realize they’re also learning math while we’re working on these graphs.”

Ford Motor Company and sustainability lifestyle platform SHFT.com unveiled the first of 10 digital short documentary films profiling cutting-edge innovators in sustainable businesses at a promotional event last night at the 404 NYC space in Midtown New York. Ford executive chairman Bill Ford introduced the film, along with actor/filmmaker Adrian Grenier and film producer Peter Glatzer, SHFT’s co-founders, who developed the The Big SHFT: 10 Innovators Changing Our World series. The film focused on Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, one of the fastest-growing green companies.

Since 2001, TerraCycle has risen from a dorm-room start-up selling worm poop-based plant food into a internationally-known growth business.   Its focus: providing consumer packaged goods companies and retailers with cause marketing programs and nonprofits with fundraising opportunities. TerraCycle has over 70,000 schools and charities collecting waste globally and they have earned collectively almost 4 million dollars just by recycling more! Whether you work for a large company, a start-up or an NGO, you'll pick up valuable lessons from Global VP Albe Zakes based on Terracyle's decade of turning "waste into wonder".

As recently as a few years ago, campaigns and initiatives tied to Earth Day were worth a large chunk of any company’s marketing budget. As more and more companies got into the game, however, consumers came to expect everyone to do at least something for Earth Day, and now it may have officially jumped the shark as far as corporate marketing and public relations go. Albe Zakes, global vice president of media relations for TerraCycle, which works with big corporations to run recycling programs, says he now dissuades customers from launching major initiatives on or around Earth Day.

As an environmental company, TerraCycle has a unique relationship with Earth Day. Celebrating our environment and spreading awareness and activism is wonderful, but we also like to remind people that the Earth needs to be taken care of every day. For the past few years, we’ve had an array of special events around Earth Day. In 2009, we launched our mini-series on National Geographic – Garbage Moguls – and in 2010, we had a Walmart Hotspot with sixty TerraCycle products were displayed in Walmart stores, right next to the products that they used to be! Think, drink pouch backpacks next to boxes of Capri Sun. Last year, 2011, we had the Old Navy Flip-Flop Replay in which we collected used flip flops at Old Navy stores across the country during the Earth Month. That same month, in partnership with Office Depot, we collected used pens and writing instruments at their retail locations.

I've also decided to take on a summer project of revamping TST's website/blog. It serves its purpose but isn't anything special. If you check out the website you'll see that in the past few months we've hosted an Eco-book contest (these books appear in our Earth Day display), appeared in the new book The Entrepreneurial Librarian, and sent the Eco-Reps (a student organization on campus) the latest proceeds from our Terra Cycle project in the amount of $231. Whew, we've been busy!