With budget cuts increasing every year, local teachers are saving trash to meet their classroom needs. Thomson Elementary, Norris Elementary and Maxwell Elementary schools earn money for used drink pouches, cookie and candy wrappers, chip bags and other trash that they send in to various participating companies.  Thomson Elementary School has the biggest "trash to cash" program, according to Lauren Taylor, public relations person for TerraCycle. TerraCycle accepts empty drink pouches, chip bags, cookie wrappers, candy wrappers, yogurt cups, Lunchables and lotion tubes and pays the school two cents for each unit of packaging.

TerraCycle is included in Entrepreneur Magazine's Top 100 Most Brilliant Companies To Watch

As part of a new collaboration, a handful of residents is turning trash into cash. It's an effort to go green while getting green. One of the first programs Gilbert teamed up with in town is Upcycle It! created by fellow resident Kristina Greene. The initiative collects non-recyclable items such as chip bags, candy-bar wrappers, coffee bags and juice pouches in a number of drop-off bins around town. The bins are collected weekly and then sent to Terracycle, an international company that takes the "trash" and makes it into a number of products. Skittles wrappers become an insulated cooler tote bag. Crushed computers and fax machines are morphed into flower pots. Circuit boards are reused as clipboards and drink coasters. Oreo Cookie packaging is transformed into a kite and much more. The innovative "recycling" is not the only benefit to Westford. Each piece of trash that's collected and sent in is worth anywhere from two cents for chip bags to 25 cents for cell phones. All the money Greene collects from Upcycle It! is then donated back to Westford schools.

MARQUETTE - The fourth- and fifth-graders in JoeyLynn Selling's class at North Star Elementary are turning snack time into a schoolwide recycling project. The kids have spent much of the school year collecting hundreds of chip bags, candy wrappers and juice pouches that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill and sending them off to be recycled into everything from backpacks to lunch boxes to notebook covers. The "trash" is boxed up and shipped to a project called TerraCycle, which uses the packaging to make tote bags, pencil cases and other items. "They have purses and handbags and backpacks," student Alli Goriesky said. "It's a lot of fun." The program accepts packaging from Frito Lay, Mars Snackfood and Kashi products. The products are then sold at retailers around the country, including the classroom store at North Star and at www.terracycle.net. "This is basically a big class project," Selling said. "Somebody's assigned to recyclables. We call it 'lunch patrol.'" Kids in the class split up responsibilities including collecting the wrappers and packaging from the entire school during lunch, washing out the juice packages and sorting them.  Even when out on field trips the kids have been known to pick up litter to put toward their project."Everybody knows now," said student Elena McCombie, explaining that other classes in the school have begun forwarding their trash to the collection.  "We'll put the box at basketball games," Goriesky said.In addition to being able to have the recycled products in their store, the class also gets two cents per item collected.  The project allows the class to send in about a pound of wrappers and juice pouches at a time, and encourages participants to also use recycled shipping materials."It's trash and it gives them a responsibility in the classroom," Selling said.

“I read about this TerraCycle program (in Reader’s Digest), which directly uses the items recycled. It looked like what we wanted to do, Hill said. “I was thinking it was just a small program, but then I saw it in a Better Homes and Gardens ad,” she said.

Along the way, Szaky (photo below) described how Terracycle had to negotiate with Pepsi and Coke for the rights to use their bottle shapes. He also talked about bottling, sleeving, and capping thousands of bottles of liquid garden fertilizer by hand before opening a factory in New Jersey; about getting sued by Scott’s, the garden product company, for trade dress infringement; and about how Terracycle and its unique upcycling concept of turning packaging waste into consumer products—bags, kites, pencil cases--is taking off around the world. “We’re establishing ourselves in a new country about every six weeks,” he told his Packaging Summit audience.

Terracycle, a company specializing in eco-friendly products, opened their Green Up Shop at the Port Authority in NYC. The products don’t incorporate circuits, sensors, or motorized parts, but they can provide you with some nifty ideas for upcycled materials and sustainable textiles. The creators of the products make sustainability look easy. Surely, you can step it up a notch and integrate some wearable tech!

Lindsay Hetzler discovered a way to turn her daughter Lorelei’s favorite drink into money for her school. By her account, Hetzler buys “a ton” of Capri Sun juice boxes for her family. Last fall while reading the back of one of the drink pouches, Hetzler learned about TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company that makes eco-friendly products from a wide range of nonrecyclable waste materials. She learned about a free nationwide program offered by TerraCycle called “Brigades” where you can earn money for your school or nonprofit organization by collecting nonrecyclable items and mailing them to the company.

A whole bunch of brand new TerraCycle items will be available, during April for a limited time only, at every single Walmart across the country. Starting April 5th, nearly 60 TerraCycle products will be sold right next to the original items they were made from. Cheetos kites and tote bags made from Frito-Lay wrappers will be sold with bags of Frito-Lay chips, while notebooks and purses made out of skittles and M&M wrappers will be sold right next to bags of Mars Candy!

I abhor Wal-Mart. Like there are many other activities involving pain or displeasure that I’d rather be involved with that step foot in a Wal-Mart. But I love Terracycle and their products being available at Wal-Mart is good for them.