Copper River Salons were already running a TerraCycle program to collect and recycle their personal care and beauty waste. At TerraCycle we provide free recycling programs (sponsored by various brands, like in this case Garnier) where we provide free shipping (via UPS) for your waste and will then reuse, upcycle or recycle the collected waste into something new.

Hopefully, Green Mountain will work harder to address this. On its website, it claims it's "actively working to meet the challenge of creating a pack that reduces environmental impact and continues to deliver an extraordinary cup of coffee." Incidentally, the cups for its recently launched Vue brewer are recyclable in facilities where No. 5 plastic is accepted. However, Vue is still a very small part of Green Mountain's business, having launched earlier this year with its original distribution through Bed Bath & Beyond(Nasdaq: BBBY ) and its own site. In February, rumor had it Green Mountain was discussing options with Terracycle, which has agreements for environmentally friendly solutions for Kraft's (NYSE: KFT ) Tassimo system and Mars' Flavia brewers, both of which compete directly with Green Mountain's Keurig.

Single-serve hot drinks in the office have just got more sustainable, thanks to the new recyclable Freshpacks from Mars Drinks North America. The packaging innovation enabled the removal of an aluminum foil layer from two of the FLAVIA^® single serve Freshpacks, as well as a move from three materials to a single, fully recyclable plastic. THE BRIGHT TEA CO.™ Earl Grey and English Breakfast teas,  will be the first products in 100 percent recyclable Freshpacks, available nationwide in fall 2012. The new recyclable materials reduce the carbon footprint by 40 percent, if the Freshpack is recycled this lowers the carbon footprint even further to 44 percent overall.   Recycling of the Freshpacks is supported by the wider Mars Drinks Recycling Program (www.recycleyourfreshpacks.com), partnering with TerraCycle^®. TerraCycle^® can collect and recycle the new Freshpacks using its innovative process, resulting in plastic that can be used to make products such as office stationery and garden furniture. For more information visit www.mars.com

TerraCycle’s food packaging recycling programs began with drink pouches. Those programs have expanded from Capri Sun and Honest Kids drink pouches, to Flavia Fresh Packs, Sprout baby food pouches, and Method Cleaner Refill packs. Clif Family Winery is soon launching a Brigade for their Climber Wine Pouches and other wine pouch packaging. Nowadays, pouches are in every aisle of every big-box retailer. They’re convenient, durable, lightweight, affordable, an all around “win”… that is until it is time to recycle them.

In the days leading up to Halloween, American consumers spend nearly $2 billion on candy. By the time the sugar-high wears off, millions of candy wrappers have been needlessly discarded and end up in landfills.  That’s why TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net/>  has partnered with Mars/Wrigley and Cadbury to create a second life for those used candy wrappers. This holiday season, conscious consumers are invited to join the Candy Wrapper Brigade by saving the wrapper every time they enjoy a Mars/Wrigley or Cadbury candy product. Collected wrappers are then sent in to the company where they’ll be upcycled into purses, backpacks, coolers, and other innovative products.

Saintly Recyclers mail in their trash. Terracycle.net will recycle (usually postage is free) and donate to charity your candy wrappers, yogurt cups, drink pouches, cookie wrappers, Flavia Freshpacks, Frito-Lay chip bags, energy and granola bar wrappers, Bear Naked wrappers, Kashi packages, cell phones, Huggies and Scott tissue wrappers, Aveno tubes, Scotch tape dispensers, corks, cereal bags, Sharpies and Papermate writing instruments, Neosporin tubes, coffee bags, lunch kits (like Lunchables), Colgate tubes and packaging, Ziploc bags and containers, Inkjet cartridges, and Sprout and Revolutions food containers. Preserveproducts.com recycles your No. 5 plastics (same company that has the receptacles at Whole Foods) and water filters into toothbrushes and razors.

Do you remember our last post about TerraCycle called Making Trash Green? You should definitely check it out if you didn't already read it. Basically, schools, churches and groups of all kinds form a brigade and start collecting! There are brigades for drink pouches, Bear Naked, Huggies, and Ziploc bags- to name a few. You simply collect and send- then TerraCycle makes a donation to your non-profit or a charity of your choice. TerraCycle then takes the trash and makes it into something not-so-trashy.

Other coffee companies are also wrestling with the waste issue. Businesses that use Flavia pods, which is made by Mars, are able to ship the used pods to the New Jersey company TerraCycle, which will compost the coffee or tea and reuse the plastic in products like pavers and fencing, a TerraCycle spokesman, Albe Zakes said. More than 2.5 million Flavia packs in the United States have been recycled in the last year. Mars sells a billion drinks a year in 35,000 workplaces worldwide. In Britain, Mr. Zakes said, TerraCycle has processed more than 800,000 coffee discs from Kraft’s Tassimo single-serve system. The results are being evaluated for possible application in the United States, a Kraft spokeswoman, Bridget MacConnell, said. Kraft and Mars are paying for collecting the pods, including shipping costs to TerraCycle.

To its credit, Green Mountain is exploring more recyclable and compostable packaging. Mars partners with TerraCycle in a program that permits offices to ship used Flavia packs to a facility that churns them into products like pencil cases or notebooks—so that is one workaround Green Mountain could pursue.  Darby Hoover of the Natural Resources Defense Council suggested prepaid envelopes that consumers can just fill with empty pods, which would then end up in facilities that would repurpose them.