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ELIMINATING THE IDEA OF WASTE®

Recycling is Boring But Does it Have to be?

TerraCycle Tom-Blog
For most people, recycling is boring. It's something they know is a good thing to do. But for many, that's just not enough motivation. I see recyclables in the trash all the time and the nation's horrid recycling rate (which estimates peg around 30-35%) is widely discussed. Over the years, many paths have been tried: paying people money per pound, a nickel deposit back per bottle, curbside collection, and to make it as easy as tossing in the trash, the single blue bin that's been popular since the 90s. Recently, companies like Greenopolis have been getting creative with incentivizing recycling, as I discussed here last week. But what about making recycling fun, something you'd even want to take an active part in doing? Is that possible? Our partnership with NBC New York is another step on that path for us. Putting the silly in recycling is a ridiculous animated Rube Goldberg style machine that "processes" things like Starburst wrappers, with the resulting new product popping out the other end. And this NBC recycling machine doesn't just stay put on their site. We've made it embeddable, and shareable on Facebook and Twitter. It may look silly, but it does two things: gets people's attention, and makes it clear that things they're used to only being able to throw away can in fact be made into something else entirely. . .