Terracycle has both a great story and a social movement at its core, founded as it was by a Princeton University dropout who launched a business selling worm-poop compost in refurbished Coke bottles. It has built an eight-figure brand largely by leveraging the marketing power of far bigger brands, either through a bit of PR jujitsu or marketing partnerships with such big marketers as Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Walmart and Target, VP Global Media Albe Zakes told the ANA in October. The jujitsu part came when Terracycle used a trademark-infringement suit by Scotts Miracle-Gro to unleash a wave of publicity. The partnership element involved enlisting major brands in its school-based recycle and reuse programs where the brand turns such things as old CapriSun pouches into new products. Terracycle also has gotten top retailers such as Walmart and Target involved in merchandising and advertising events around its compost products in recycled containers around Earth Month in April.

Eco-friendly cleaners have become more popular as people try to stay away from harsh chemicals, and now there’s more good news: not only are the eco-friendly cleaners available, but the bottles are being made from recycled plastics and are also recyclable themselves. TerraCycle, a pioneering upcycling and recycling company, has partnered with Method soaps and Dropps laundry detergent to offer recycling for the soap refill packaging and laundry packaging, respectively. The Method Refill Brigade and Dropps Laundry Detergent Pouch Brigade close the loop between eco-friendly product contents and product packaging. Additionally, TerraCycle’s eco-friendly cleaners are all natural, packaged in recycled plastic, and the packaging is also recyclable.

The students at Muse School CA in Malibu canyon will no longer throw their spent glue sticks and granola bar wrappers in the trash. On Monday, the nonprofit private school for children age 2 through 12 unveiled a new zero-waste sorting unit that not only recycles valuable commodities such as plastic, glass, metal and paper, it reuses broken electronics and office materials and upcycles pens and other classroom castoffs that aren't recycled through the city's curbside system. But the centerpiece of the zero-waste school is how the students interact with it. For that, sustainable-design consultant Moore devised a five-bin collection area that emphasizes reuse first. The first bin is for anything that can be reused or repurposed. The second is for pens, glue sticks, cereal boxes and whatever else the school has agreed to upcycle into other products through Terracycle. Only then are objects considered for recycling. A fourth bin is for e-waste, and the fifth, and final receptacle, is for trash, which the kids themselves dispose of after weighing it to see how close to their zero-waste goal they've gotten.

Forget, for a moment, the concerns about all the candy most kids carted home from trick-or-treating. Push aside, if you will, the worries about tooth decay, childhood obesity and those extended sugar highs. What about all those wrappers? TerraCycle - a company that hates waste and that has made dealing with it a quirky, funky mission - will gladly take them off your kids' sticky little hands. The New Jersey company is known for its "brigades" in schools and at other nonprofits. These teams collect juice pouches, potato chip bags and more - dozens of otherwise "trash" items - and then send them to TerraCycle, which pays two cents per item.