Recycling Today’s sustainability alert is a weekly roundup of sustainability news and announcements. TerraCycle, Mountain House announce free packaging recycling program Mountain House, Tangent, Oregon, and TerraCycle, Trenton, New Jersey, have partnered to offer consumers a free, easy way to recycle packaging from the freeze-dried food company’s product line. Mountain House labels itself as the gold-standard brand of camping and backpacking food. Through the Mountain House Recycling Program, consumers can send in their empty pouches to be recycled for free. Consumers can sign up on the TerraCycle program page and then mail in the packaging using a prepaid shipping label. Once collected, the packaging is cleaned and processed into a rigid plastic that can be molded into new recycled products. Additionally, for every pound of material shipped to TerraCycle, collectors can earn $1 to donate to a nonprofit, school or charitable organization of their choice. “Mountain House is giving their customers the unique opportunity to minimize their environmental impact by offering them a way to responsibly dispose of the packaging from their freeze-dried meals,” TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky says. “In turn, by participating in the Mountain House Recycling Program, customers are one step closer to truly minimizing their environmental impact.” The Mountain House Recycling Program is open to any interested individual, school, office, or community organization. In other TerraCycle news, Gillette, Boston, Massachusetts, customers will now be able to recycle disposable razors, replaceable-blade cartridge units and associated packaging nationally through a similar program and partnership with TerraCycle. Through the Gillette Recycling Program, participants can sign up for the program on TerraCycle’s website, package the razors in a secure, puncture proof package and send it to TerraCycle for recycling. Community organizations are also invited to set up public drop-off locations to support the program. TerraCycle and Gillette will provide an exclusive razor recycling bin. Starbucks trials recyclable cups Starbucks announced customers in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and London will help test a few different cups that will be both recyclable and compostable. The recyclable cup designs are a result of the NextGen Cup Challenge, in which 12 winners were announced February. Through the challenge, Starbucks, which is moving towards a goal to eliminate plastic straws from all stores worldwide by 2020, challenged brands, including Coca-Cola Company and McDonald’s, to develop recycling solutions for paper cups. In addition, Starbucks will roll out new lightweight, recyclable strawless lids to all stores in the United States and Canada in the next year, while strawless lids for cold drinks were rolled out in select stores last year. Starbucks says it is also testing some of the NextGen winner’s solutions that could apply to straws. Growing the Mr. Trash Wheel project Invented by John Kellet in May 2014 and maintained by Waterfront Partnership as part of its Healthy Harbor Initiative, the solar-powered Mr. Trash Wheel collects litter and debris from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The trash wheel project has collected and prevented more than one million pounds of discarded material, including plastic bags, foam containers and water bottles, from entering the oceans since its installation. The river’s current provides power to turn the water wheel, which lifts waste and debris from the water and deposits it into a dumpster barge. When the dumpster is full, the material is taken to a waste-to-energy plant, where it is burned to generate power for Maryland homes. According to a spokesperson for the initiative, Waterfront Partnership holds occasional “dumpster dives” to sort and recycle the collected plastics and polystyrene, but currently there are no plans to increase recycling of the material. “The Healthy Harbor team always says that the ultimate goal is for the trash wheel family to go out of business,” the spokesperson says. Two additional trash wheels have been installed in Baltimore with a fourth wheel in the planning stages for Gwynn's Falls, Baltimore. Beyond Baltimore, San Francisco Bay Area and Ballona Creek, California, have started the fundraising process to install trash wheels, with a goal to launch the projects by spring 2020.