Glenwood Middle School started a new club for students to help make the Earth a better place. In its first year, the Helping Our Planet Earth, or HOPE, Club focused on projects aimed at reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills.

This school year, Glenwood Middle School started a new club for students, HOPE. HOPE (Helping Our Planet Earth) club focuses on helping make the Earth a better place to live.

"It smells. It's nasty," said Gwen Shindel, who teaches fourth and fifth grade at Prairie Winds Elementary School in Monument. But not one student has complained about the school's efforts to save normally unrecyclable food packaging from ending up in the garbage.

Catherine E. Doyle Elementary School in Wood-Ridge is in the running for a new playground. Richard Fallon, vice president of the Wood-Ridge Public Education Foundation, said that the school has been entered into an online contest to win a free playground from TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company.

Michael Fackler, a 17-year-old High School student of Loveland High School in Cincinnati, Ohio has a goal of making his school a Zero Waste High School. His school is currently at 85% and one of the ways he is achieving this goal is by utilizing TerraCycle Brigade programs.

The delightful and clever folks over at Terracycle tell us they’ve opened up an Etsy shop to sell off their office furnishings (so they can be replaced with new handmade items).

When the students at DeFranco Elementary School go outside for recess, they have no jungle gym, no swing set, no slides nor any other playground equipment to play on. This spring, they are asking for the public's vote to change that.

“We were one of the very first groups to sign up with TerraCycle.” According to Michael Baumann, public relations intern with TerraCycle, the company takes “difficult-to-recycle packaging and turns them into affordable innovative products.”

                Fifth-graders at Hayes Cooper are learning about recycling in a semester long project called Recycling: Lighting the Fire.The class is a member of Terracycle, a company in New Jersey that creatively up-cycles trash into useful products.

“We want to bring new things to the children. It’s not just science. There’s the exhibit by Terracycle. There are the edible bugs. You can eat bugs. Maybe not in this culture, but in other cultures they eat bugs,” she said.