Also featured on the FOX affiliate in Rochester, NY., for recycling efforts.

Yesterday my son threw away a ketchup bottle and a toothpaste tube. The ketchup bottle had another serving it it, about 1 1/2 Tablespoons. I grabbed it and turned it upside down on the counter and used the rest last night. I took the toothpaste tube and showed him how much product was being thrown away. Americans throw away 1 BILLION toothpaste tubes a year, along with shampoo, conditioner, and lotion bottles. On average, they leave 10% of the product in them. Not only does this waste the earths resources, it wastes your money!

A recycling revolution is going on through the halls of North Andover Middle School. Students, teachers and other staffers have cut the volume of trash from the cafeteria by more than half, according to Craig Richard, one of the teachers who helped get the program going. The three lunch periods at the school used to produce around 30 bags of trash per day, Richard said. "Now it's around a dozen," he said. Tod Workman, school custodian, pointing to a cart that was about half full of trash bags, said it used to overflow with refuse from the cafeteria. The recycling renaissance was spearheaded not by adults, but by two eighth-graders, Douglas Starrett and Harry Ustik, who wrote a letter to the school's online newspaper NAMS Knightly News, in which they took the school to task for throwing away too much trash.

Suncoast Elementary School first-grade teacher Tandra Lamia wears a delicious-looking visual aid when it's time to tend to the school's recycling program. It's an apron made with the empty bags of Frito-Lay products — Ruffles, Funyuns, Doritos, Tostitos, Fritos and very colorful. The children collect and send the bags to TerraCycle, a company that turns them into other products. It even pays for this treasured trash. It's a schoolwide project that the first grade handles. Dale Ryan, 7, said they are collecting chip bags now, but that the first-graders used to collect drink pouches, empty glue sticks and candy wrappers. They send the bags in bulk and get 2 cents for each one. The students count and package the bags. One of the children's jobs, said Grace Goyette, 6, is "to put some in a box, and you have to dump all the crumbs and flatten it and put it in a box." Angelina Absher-Denova, 7, said the bags are remade into stuff, like benches, trash cans, recycling bins, aprons and backpacks. "They even make pavers out of the chip bags," added Lamia. This is a big job for such little children, but they seem to understand why they do it. "So there won't be a big hole in the earth," said Brianna Johnson, 6, referring to a landfill. Aliyah Nolasco, 7, had another reason. "Because," she said, "the Earth can get very stinky if you put garbage underground." Said Rachel Hartman, 7: "The company makes it into things so we can help the Earth instead of walking into trash every day." Since her classes started back in 2009, students have brought in thousands of dollars, and Lamia emphasized that even though the collections are coordinated by her class, the entire school participates and benefits from the proceeds. Money goes to school supplies, and, she said, "We've also in the past used it to defray the cost of field trips for the children." The money is nice, but the lessons are valuable, too. "We're a very nature-friendly classroom," Lamia said.

Cumming Elementary deserves congratulations for the amount of waste they are keeping out of the local landfill. The school is one of the top collectors of hard-to-recycle waste in TerraCycle's nationwide Brigade programs. The students collect Capri Sun drink pouches, Frito-Lay chip bags, cookie wrappers and Elmer's glue containers among several other items, which earns them money for charity and keeps the garbage out of the local landfill. Cumming Elementary has earned more than $2,620 from recycling items that would otherwise be thrown away, which translates to approximately 130,806 units of waste. TerraCycle turns the collected packaging into new products such as tote bags, recycling bins, watering cans and backpacks. The school is one of 90,000 schools and community groups across the globe collecting almost 50 different kinds of products and packaging that TerraCycle accepts. In addition to participating in the TerraCycle Brigades, Cumming Elementary also recycles cans and bottles through the Dream Machine Recycle Rally, a national program co-sponsored by PepsiCo that aims to raise awareness of the importance of recycling among K-12 students. Schools can earn rewards and compete for prizes. Interested parties in either the TerraCycle Brigade programs or the Dream Machine Recycle Rally can visit www.terracycle.com to sign up.

The Maricopa Community Colleges and a national company called TerraCycle want to save the planet one pencil at a time. Ten MCC schools are now part of the Writing Instrument Brigade, a program under TerraCycle, in which they box and ship used writing utensils to TerraCycle and receive a monetary donation in return. Since joining the program in early 2012, MCC has shipped more than 6,000 utensils to the organization. With the used and abused pens and pencil, TerraCycle breaks them down and brings them back to life in the form of park benches, watering cans, and recycling bins. TerraCycle launched its recycling programs in 2007 and has since collected more than 2 billion pieces of waste from being discarded in landfills. Through the Writing Instrument Brigade, they have donated more than $3.5 million to charities and schools. “We are 10 colleges, two skill centers and numerous education centers, all dedicated to educational excellence and to meeting the needs of businesses and the citizens of Maricopa County, Arizona,” said Chanda Fraulino, recycle program coordinator for MCC, in a statement. “The sustainability coordinators and several of our colleges collaboratively participate in the TerraCycle brigades. The best part about the Writing Instruments brigade is that we divert waste from the landfill while earning money to support student scholarships.” TerraCycle has many arms reaching into the field of sustainability. They partner with companies like Sanford, who sponsors the Writing Instrument Brigade, and Frito-Lay, who sponsors another program called the Chip Bag Brigade. Overall, there are 90,000 organizations who take part in the “Brigade” recycling and upcycling programs worldwide. MCC is one of 1,300 businesses and organizations who are a part of the Writing Instrument Brigade. With the money coming in from recycling used utensils, MCC is planning to support the Maricopa Foundation for the Sustainability Scholarship fund. These scholarships will be awarded to a student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in sustainability or environmental science. To find out more, visit www.terracycle.com.

The Terra Stone Plant Caddy is made from drink pouches recycled into TerraCycle plastic. The caddy can be found in Target stores. The saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. For TerraCycle, an upcycling and recycling company in Trenton, N.J., trash from schools in Knoxville and surrounding areas has become its treasure. Items that are traditionally non-recyclable — such as Frito-Lay chip bags, Capri Sun drink pouches, MOM Brands cereal bags and Colgate oral care products — are collected to make products sold in stores such as Target. The company recycles — or upcycles — trash into backpacks, tote bags, pencil cases, notebooks, messenger bags, and binders as well as watering cans and plant caddies. The schools and community groups around the country who send their trash to TerraCycle don't do so without reward. The items collected accumulate points which can be converted to cash or gifts.

Since 2001, TerraCycle has risen from a dorm-room start-up selling worm poop-based plant food into a internationally-known growth business.   Its focus: providing consumer packaged goods companies and retailers with cause marketing programs and nonprofits with fundraising opportunities. TerraCycle has over 70,000 schools and charities collecting waste globally and they have earned collectively almost 4 million dollars just by recycling more! Whether you work for a large company, a start-up or an NGO, you'll pick up valuable lessons from Global VP Albe Zakes based on Terracyle's decade of turning "waste into wonder".