Every weekday at lunchtime, a curious scene plays out in elementary school cafeterias at lunchtime. Students unpack their lunchboxes and hawk their dietary wares with a fervor that would make a Wall Street broker blush.  A Fruit Roll-up for a Chewy bar here, a Yoo-hoo for a Juicy Juice there.  Chocolate bars are worth their weight in gold.

Three years ago, while Tina Bauer was a classroom assistant at the Oceanville kindergarten in Galloway Township, she and a co-worker decided to improve the school's recycling program. A quick web search turned up Princeton-based TerraCycle, and the simple, four-word tagline it was using at the time. "'Get cash for trash' was their little blurb on it," said Bauer, of the Absecon Highlands section of Galloway Township. "So I clicked on it and said, 'Hey, we can do this at Oceanville.'" The idea behind TerraCycle - which collects and "upcycles" less conventionally recyclable items, such as potato chip bags and juice boxes into tote bags and other items - is a simple one. Nevertheless, Bauer said, the plan was initially met with confusion by the staff. Bauer had signed up to lead a brigade, a group that collects a specific item - Capri Sun juice pouches, in this case - for TerraCycle in exchange for points, which can be redeemed for cash donations to schools or participating nonprofit organizations. After the first few shipments, that confusion gave way to enthusiasm for the project.

Almost six months ago I wrote about a new program that I expected to sharply expand our recycling efforts and possibly even shift our entire business model. The program, I thought then, was about two weeks from its introduction. Turns out, we didn’t quite get there. What happened was a series of huge information technology delays — so many that the program has only just now gone into beta testing with an anticipated go-live date of mid-April. The goal is to be up and running in time for Earth Day (April 22), which is effectively Christmas for companies like TerraCycle. If it does come together, it will not be the first major evolution of our business model. We got started selling worm-waste plant fertilizer in reused bottles. Today, we still sell our plant food but we also have more than 30 million people around the world collecting previously non-recyclable waste streams that we turn into more than 1,500 products.

In this webinar, you will hear about TerraCycle's unique approach to product development and how they collaborate with a number of brands including P&G, Capri-Sun, Target, and Frito-Lay.  Through these partnerships, TerraCycle helps brands create a full range of products for home, school, the office, the garden, and even for pets!  These programs not only help to eliminate waste, but also enable unique and effective marketing and communication strategies.  Hear more about TerraCycle's story, one of the highest rated sessions shared at the 2011 ANA Masters of Marketing Annual Conference and walk away with a new perspective on innovation.

Let’s face it. We’re not all cloth-diapering mamas. For many of us disposable diapers are the practical choice. But just because you use disposables, doesn’t mean you don’t consider your impact on the environment and try to make greener changes in other ways. But now a partnership with Huggies and TerraCycle–a recycling powerhouse company that thrives on waste, we can do a little bit more to offset those diapers that end up being tossed into landfills. TerraCycle is known for taking things like CapriSun wrappers, Doritos bags, or circuit boards and turning them into reusable products like grocery totes, clocks and outdoor fencing. But as part of a program with Huggies, called the Huggies Brigade, they are collecting the plastic packaging from Huggies Diaper bags and recycling it into other products. This keeps it out of the landfill and re-worked into another purpose.

Albe was one of my very first guests when I started Mrs. Green. We’ve come a long way baby! The tagline on their website? Eliminate The Idea of Waste. Love it! You also know I love numbers so ponder these and plan to join us: Number of people collecting trash through partnerships with Terracyle – 26,511,927. Waste units collected: 2,262,684,595. Dollars donated to charities: $3,491,776.12. Counting the days. This show sponsored by Environmental Development Group (EDG)

Recently Mrs. Erickson and a group of 4th graders learned about Terracycle by looking at the food packaging items we collect at RES and thinking about what becomes of these items.  They shared what they learned with other students.  Terracycle is a company that repurposes packaging, most of which currently can't be put in our recycling bins.  Students recycle in their classrooms at snack time and in the cafeteria.  The items are sent free of charge to Terracycle and they in turn send RES money, up to 3 cents for each piece. All this money is then donated to the Richmond Food Shelf.  To date, we have recycled over twenty-one thousand packages, raising money and reducing our landfill contributions!

Recycled Stocking The kids will dig it if you change up your mantel with this repurposed Capri Sun wrapper stocking from TerraCycle. It’s 14″ tall. dwellsmart.com, terracycle.com Don't Blow a Circuit It won’t process your WORD document, but these coasters made from real circuit boards from TerraCycle will protect your coffee tables and keep more waste out of the landfills. dwellsmart.com

In 2008, one Upper Blue Elementary fourth-grader figured out how to divert juice pouches from the landfill and turn them into useful and innovative creations like bags and purses. Now, Samantha Buer's project continues, and it's not only pulling waste from the landfill, it's raising money to provide clean water for three people for one year, meals for hungry Americans, carbon credits to reduce carbon from the atmosphere, adoptions of 37 acres of wildfire land, and chicks for needy families. They also donated money to the Red Cross, Oxfam America, Save the Children, Doctors without Borders and AmeriCares. Buer's “Juice Pouch Brigade,” created through TerraCycle, creates an avenue through which Upper Blue's Kids in Action students have collected more than 7,225 juice bags from Capri Sun, Honest Kids, Kool Aid and other brands since 2008. Terracyle is an organization whose goal is to eliminate waste by creating collection and solution systems for anything that gets sent to the landfill.

TerraCycle began out of a business plan contest. Tom Szaky wanted to establish a company that would convert waste into fertilizer by feeding it to worms and then utilizing their poop. Apparently he had some success with it previously and wanted to give it a go. I think that is such a completely random idea but certainly helps keep the planet a bit more waste efficient. According to Wikipedia: Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value. This company makes wallets, bookbags, purses, kites, pencil pouches, picture frames, clocks, flower pots and a ton of other household objects out of materials that would have otherwise been rotting in a landfill somewhere. In the beginning, they were approached independently by Honest Tea, Stonyfeild and Clif Bar who all had problems with the disposal of their product wrappers and containers. This is what triggered their "upcycling" shift and pretty soon they became partners with a bunch of huge names like Nabisco, Capri-Sun and Frito Lay. To collect the waste, they set up programs through partnerships through schools and businesses and popular brands looking to promote more recycling of their packaging. These establishments would have collection boxes set up, specified for particular items that TerraCycle is interested in upcycling. People would put their trash in them and then the bins would be sent off and the trash would be converted into something useful. Garbage Moguls was a reality tv show on TerraCycle that aired a few years back on National Geographic. It followed the unorthodox creative processes that make their company successful. I think that this company is taking giant leaps in a direction that might make our planet last a little longer. It's important that we start working now to ensure that we can continue to live safe and healthy lives here for generations to come.