With kindergarten teacher Karen Dunlap as their leader, the Norristown school collects drink pouches, chip bags and cookie wrappers — hard-to-recycle waste — and sends them away to be upcycled into eco-friendly products. Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials, and it’s what the Trenton, N.J.-based company TerraCycle does with candy wrappers, energy bar wrappers and other consumer products, while at the same time paying the schools and charitable organizations that collect the used packaging.

Remember my TerraCycle post awhile back? They are helping reduce chip waste too once we're done eating them, by recycling those Frito-Lay chips bags into products like FritoLay wrapper totes <http://www.terracycle.net/products/67-Frito-Lay-Wrapper-Tote> ! You can sign up to help by saving and sending in your chip bags!

Teen Kids News featured the TerraCycle Brigades.  T/KN airs on more than 200 TV stations, including 53 Fox, 47 ABC, 27 NBC, 29 CBS, 20 MNT, 6 CW affiliates and on 26 IND Stations.

From its humble beginnings selling worm-poop fertilizer, this New Jersey product manufacturer upcycles retail trash into retail treasure. Each and every product on this earth has a life span,” said Tom Szaky, CEO and vice president of licensing and product development at TerraCycle, Inc. “The end-of-life reality of a bag of potato chips is that the food ends up in the toilet and the bag ends up in the garbage. Same with a pen; you buy a pen, the ink runs out. The only difference is, some products can be recycled easily and others not so easily.”

TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net/>  is truly an amazing company.  I thought what they do was really neat the first time that I heard about them.  When I saw their bags, totes, and back packs at Walmart, I thought they were the cutest products!  You may have seen them yourself.  Have you seen the cute M&M bags or the Capri Sun totes and back packs?  Those are the workings of TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net/> !  Just check out some of their products below!

Just about every school - public or private - needs money. And I'm not against it by any means. This year I'm chairing the fund raising committee for my younger son's school. My goal is to incorporate projects that teach as well as bring in money. But In my quest, I've found another that I must share. The company is called TerraCycle, and its aim is to make eco-friendly, affordable consumer products from waste.

That’s where TerraCycle comes into play. The goal of TerraCycle is to prevent snack and drink containers from ending up in landfills or being incinerated. TerraCycle helps band consumers together into groups — called “Brigades” — to return used packaging in bulk to TerraCycle. Returned goods are then cleaned out and transformed into new products including bags, coolers, clip boards, picture frames and kites. In addition, for every package returned the brigade earns money to put towards a charity of their choice or, if the team is from a school or non-profit organization, they can keep the money to further their mission.  It is a win-win program: people can reduce their waste while raising money for a good cause. As word spreads about TerraCycle more and more snack and beverage companies are joining the program, meaning even more packaging can be returned and re-purposed. Some major companies whose wrappers can be sent back to TerraCycle include: Stonyfield, Capri Sun, Frito Lay, Kraft, Mars Wrigley, Kashi, Aveeno, Colgate, and Ziploc. The recycled products that TerraCycle produces are then sold at major retailers, including Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and K-Mart. The end products are labeled as TerraCycle products, so consumers know they are supporting a good cause and creating demand for the program. According to the TerraCycle website, there are 11,597,783 people collecting trash with TerraCycle brigades, and over one billion units of waste have already been collected and re-purposed into 186 different products. If that doesn’t already sound good enough, these efforts also helped raise $1.2 Million for various schools, non profits, and charities across the country.

Tom Szaky, a 28-year-old wunderkind from Canada, wants you to send him your garbage, and he’ll pay the shipping. Oh, and he also wants to make a lot of money and save the world by taking unrecyclable waste like chip bags and juice pouches and turning them into new products like backpacks, kites, coolers and clocks. Now he and his company, TerraCycle, take tons of hard-to-recycle plastics and other waste collected from collection “brigades” formed in schools, churches businesses and service organizations and turns them into products sold at Walmart and Target. They pay the shipping for articles like shopping bags, used pens, whatever, and pay 2 cents per unit to a charity on behalf of the collecting organization. All of it is organized through the company Web site, terracycle.net. The feel-good business model has worked with giant companies like Kraft Foods, Frito-Lay and Kimberly-Clark, who pitch the program on their packaging. Walmart and Target also have joined up, setting up collection points and selling products.

It seems easy, at first, to hate Tom Szaky, who gives the keynote address at Columbia’s fourth annual Green is Good for Business conference on Tuesday, Sept. 14. At 27, Szaky is the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company that he started in his Princeton dorm room. Last Friday, he was driving up the West Coast to a Dave Matthews Band show, having just met with one of his company’s big clients: Starbucks. Other clients include Kraft Foods, Home Depot and Frito-Lay. But the goal of TerraCycle, his nine-year-old company, is so jaw dropping — and so freakishly noble — that scorn and jealousy dissipate quickly.

One parent at Lincoln Elementary School has come up with a creative way to raise money for the school while promoting recycling to students. The school is collecting candy wrappers, Capri Sun pouches and other items for TerraCycle, a company that then turns the recyclables into coolers, lunch bags, and other products sold at major retailers. In return for the items, TerraCycle makes a donation to the school. Jammie Esker Schaer, who has two children at the school, discovered the idea at a party.