Fountain City Elementary School second-grader Maia Koontz helps her mother, Nelia Koontz, sort through juice pouches and chip bags that will be sent to TerraCycle for recycling. Fountain City Elementary School is getting paid for its trash. Taking recycling beyond the blue and green bins, the school collects drink pouches and chip bags and then sends them to Terra-Cycle. The company diverts the waste from landfills by using it to create items such as tote bags and lunch boxes. TerraCycle pays schools and nonprofits for the otherwise non-recyclable waste.

UTSA community members now can add Mars candy wrappers and Frito Lay chip bags to the list of materials that can be recycled on campus.  As part of its Green Thread sustainability program, ARAMARK Higher Education <http://www.campusdish.com/en-US/CSSW/UTSA/Sustainability/>  has partnered with TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net> , a New Jersey-based company, to 'upcycle' the packaging of these popular snack brands.

For the Earth loving person on your gift giving list, consider a couple of gifts from Terracycle. I personally think that Terracycle is just a wonderfully brilliant company, who produces beautiful items from recycled trash. I myself own one of their tote bags and a few of their pencil cases. They are made ridiculously well and are always a conversation starter.

Terracycle upcycles consumer waste into new salable goods. They primarily harvest their raw material from schoolchildren as part of charity drives, though they are now placing recycling stations at certain Walmart stores. At the Walmart centers they pay 3 cents per piece, but only for a narrow range of product packaging; the website supports a wider range of recyclables. The spirit of the project is wonderful, but the problem is that it creates zombie advertising and branding for these undead consumer objects. Which is actually not all that surprising, as the Walmart program is sponsored by the very brands whose packaging are featured in the upcycled goods.

Terracycle upcycles consumer waste into new salable goods. They primarily harvest their raw material from schoolchildren as part of charity drives, though they are now placing recycling stations at certain Walmart stores. At the Walmart centers they pay 3 cents per piece, but only for a narrow range of product packaging; the website supports a wider range of recyclables.

A company founded on worm excrement is turning trash into cash for St. Matthew's Lutheran School. Empty juice pouches, potato chip bags, Snicker's candy bar wrappers all are worth two cents or more to Kay Abts' students and St. Matthew's School.  Abts and the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade class have partnered with TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based firm that purchases the discarded wrappings. The erstwhile garbage will reappear on retailers' shelves as backpacks, pencil cases, totebags and other "upcycled consumer items."

Princeton entrepreneur wants to rid the globe of most of its trash The heart of Princeton resident Tom Szaky’s $20-million-a-year business empire is an old printing plant at 121 New York Ave. in Trenton, where most of the company’s 75 employees work, at desks made of old doors, with a computer network cobbled together from other companies’ obsolete hardware, with dividers made of old vinyl hip-hop records and empty soda bottles, and in some cases walking on floor tiles made of processed plastic and aluminum juice pouches.

When it comes to eco-mindedness, throwing anything away can be an anxiety riddled experience.  Every product is rigorously analyzed guaranteeing the trashcan is the only option.  In steps Tom Szaky, an innovate man with an earth changing idea, Sponsored Waste. Tom Szaky started TerraCycle in 2001 as a Princeton University freshman, with the hopes of winning the Princeton Business Plan Contest.  His idea was to address the environmental issue of trash by using worms to eat organic waste thus producing fertilizer.

With TerraCycle, one person's trash is another person's eco-friendly retail product. The brainchild of a 19-year-old Princeton University freshman in 2001, TerraCycle uses a wide variety of non-recyclable items to make more than 50 diverse products that are sold at major retailers, including Target, The Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Office Max, Whole Foods Market and Petco.