Some Callaway County schools are participating in an international recycling company's re-purposing program. TerraCycle Inc. collects certain trash items that aren't typically recyclable, such as candy wrappers and juice pouches, and uses them to create products like bags, park benches, ice melt and flower pots.

In 2009 a parent volunteer at St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Glen Burnie saw an advertisement for a company called TerraCycle. Its “Get cash for trash” headline caught her attention, and before you could say, ‘Sounds too good to be true,’ there was a bin in the school cafeteria for the students to deposit their empty juice pouches at lunch. Since then, the school has collected over 70,000 juice pouches and recycles an average of 1,000 pouches per week during the school year. Founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, TerraCycle began upcycling various products around 2007. An initiative that started with drink pouches, today the company offers more than 40 Brigades® that collect what was previously non-recyclable or difficult-to- recycle waste. A brigade is simply the term TerraCycle uses to designate its donations—so there is, for example, the Yogurt Container Brigade, the Cheese Packaging Brigade, and the Candy Wrapper Brigade. St. Paul’s initally joined the Drink Pouch Brigade. Most of the brigades are free for participants and include free shipping as well as a donation for each piece of waste recycled.

When our stuff is thrown away it ends up in a landfill. Now, that’s a really backward way to run a country and care for the planet. We are spending money to build lined and permitted landfills until the hole in the ground is full, and then we spend more on capping that landfill with an engineered and permitted design for that closing. And then we dig another big hole and proceed to fill that one, too. That’s our tax money. We worked to earn it and then, instead of saving it, we throw some away! Plympton does not have roadside trash pick-up. We have a transfer station. We take our trash there, where people are paid to oversee the crushing, sweeping up and seeing that it is picked up for hauling to a landfill. Trucks, truck drivers, gasoline, and all the administrative overhead costs that go with any business all go into hauling away our trash. Can you imagine how costly that is? Check out your town’s budget for that and think about it the next time you throw something away that could be taken out of that costly equation by recycling it. The trash bins would be open for receiving for a longer time, thus reducing the pick-up costs. Recycling would go up, bringing in money for the town. Halifax Town Hall has been collecting bottle caps for a few years now, all because of one little boy whose class was participating in a recycling program. The boy wanted to collect more than anyone else, and he did, with the help of a bunch of women collecting caps all year long. What began as a fun project to help one enthusiastic boy has become a routine practice. It would feel odd now to not remove the cap, thus lowering the value of the bottle, for they are made out of different plastics. Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. We need to pay more attention to the first two, and then, when we no longer can find a use for something, it’s nice to know that we have more options for recycling than what is offered by our town programs. It’s important to reduce our waste of money and our waste of the earth, too. “Terra” is Latin for “earth.” You can join in celebrating the care of our terra firma on April 22, this year’s Earth Day, by following the example set by the third-graders collecting paper and the little boy collecting bottle caps and Kevin helping Franklin Park Zoo via TerraCycle. Let the savings begin!

It’s time for spring cleaning, and the truth is in the trash. It’s springtime, alright. Down by the street there are bottles and packages tossed out of passing cars. I hate the looks of it, and I can’t understand how some people can do that without a bothered conscience. I am only thankful for a memory it elicits. When my children were young I discovered what looked like a bottle dump, except that these weren’t old and they were mostly “nip” bottles. My children confessed that I had stumbled upon their laboratory. They wanted to see what would grow in various mediums such as dirt, water or moss. My sister’s boy began to plead with jealousy that he wanted a lab, too! Don’t you just love children’s creative and sometimes competitive spirit? In a similar spirit, some people are making money by making creative recycling their business. One such company is TerraCycle based in Trenton, N.J. It was founded by the worm poop guy. You know of him, right? I remember the story being in the news but did not realize he has grown from homemade fertilizer to fantastic recycling partnerships all over the world. According to their website, “Founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old Princeton University freshman, TerraCycle began by producing organic fertilizer, packaging liquid worm poop in used soda bottles. Since then TerraCycle has grown into one of the fastest-growing green companies in the world.” TerraCylcing was recently brought to my attention by Kevin Rogers. Kevin works at the Franklin Park Zoo (among other cool places), where they receive some much-needed funds for collecting items usually considered trash. Candy bags, bread bags, cookie packages, cosmetic containers, tooth brushes, floss containers, pens and highlighters are among the items currently being collected. Kevin hopes to expand the benefits by finding locations allowing him to place collection boxes. He would also like to have some attractive containers built by partnering with the schools’ vocational classes. I suggested a Scout might be interested in the idea for an Eagle Scout project. For right now, the project has begun at the Halifax Recycling Center, with drop-offs of potato chip bags, cookie packages and candy bar wrappers. They ask that you please not place these items in your roadside pick-up, but take them to the Recycling Center.

Since 2010, students and faculty at East Middle School in Westminster have been participating in an eco-friendly program through the recycling and up-cycling company, TerraCycle. Now, through their efforts, the school has become one of the top 100 collectors of candy wrappers in the United States, according to TerraCycle.

On Easter morning children will wake to find that the Easter Bunny has filled their Easter baskets with lots of sweet treats. TerraCycle is offering consumers an environmentally-conscious alternative to filling trashcans with all of those candy wrappers. In addition, their fun DIY projects include instructions to get the whole family involved in having an Eco-Easter.

Celebrate the Pink, Yellow, and “Green” Hues of Easter TerraCycle®Provides Easter DIY Project and Free Collection Program for Candy Wrappers Spring is in the air, and the Easter bunny is just a hop, skip and a jump away. This year, make sure to fill your Easter baskets, but not your garbage cans, with sweet treats. TerraCycle offers an environmentally-conscious alternative for all those leftover candy wrappers as well as fun DIY projects to get the whole family excited about an Eco-Easter. With the help of partners MOM Brands™and M&Ms, TerraCycle hopes to make this springtime holiday greener than the newly-grown grass.

Love it or loathe it, Valentine’s Day is quickly approaching. Some are planning romantic dates with their longtime sweetheart. Some are planning to finally ask out their crush at recess. Regardless of your plans this Valentine’s Day, TerraCycle has sweet ways to celebrate that are good for the planet, good for the wallet and good for you.

Plastic-coated candy wrappers have long been a recycling dilemma because of their size, weight and lack of valuable, post-life material. But even though they’re tiny in size, they’re everywhere. In fact, Americans consumed 23.8 pounds of candy per capita in 2008 alone. We are also big fans of the upcycling geniuses at TerraCycle, who collect hard-to-recycle items to create products ranging from book bags to fire logs. The company has partnered with Mars to collect wrappers through its Candy Wrapper Brigade, a free program that pays nonprofits to help collect candy wrappers. For each wrapper collected, Mars and TerraCycle will donate 2 cents to the charity of the donor’s choice.