The big game is right around the corner The PUPPY BOWL! (Speaking of which, fun fact! Last year, 9 of the pups came straight from Pennsylvania SPCA shelters!)  (Oh, and that other game for those football fans.) With Puppybowl and Superbowl translates into dips, appetizers and parties! And with all those dips come chips! Herrs, Lays, Sun, Tortilla, and many other chips! Oh, chip heaven is on the way for me!

WAVERLY, Iowa --- Recycling is second nature to Joanna Ewest, who remembers newspaper drives as a school girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest. Hanging on to more obscure trash --- like empty cheese packages, cereal bags and pretzel containers --- is a relatively new habit, one she hopes fellow Waverly residents embrace. "My motive is we should take care of what we are given," Ewest said. "We've been given this wonderful earth and should be taking care of it."

A Pinecrest High School recycling club is striving to make Moore County a little greener. Aayushi Patel, a school senior and president of the Student Environmental Association, said her group has recently initiated a pair of projects that involve both her school and the international community. "Our biggest project at this time is the TerraCycle company's chip bag recycling competition, which is being held at Pinecrest for teachers and students to participate together to collect the highest amount of used chip bags," she said. "The TerraCycle company will then collect the bags for recycling." Patel said that 21 third-period classes will participate, with the winning class awarded a pizza party by Mellow Mushroom. Patel said the group collected 21,646 chip bags during the semester. "Our club mission is to spread awareness for recycling chip bags so that we have less trash occupying landfills," she said. "To include the Sandhills community into our recycling initiative, we have partnered with the Subway restaurants at Pinecrest Plaza and at Town and Country Shopping Center to put a recycling bin at their stores for Frito-Lay chip bags."

TerraCycle is going to turn your trash into KME's cash! These are all the items we are collecting.

TerraCycle is a company founded around ten years ago by a freshman at Princeton. Tom Szaky’s idea was to revolutionize how we think about waste…by eliminating it. TerraCycle began by producing organic fertilizer, packaging liquid worm poop in used soda bottles. Since then TerraCycle has grown into one of the fastest-growing green companies in the world. They create national recycling systems for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste. TerraCycle converts the collected waste into a wide variety of products and materials. With more than 20 million people collecting waste in over 20 countries TerraCycle has diverted billions of units of waste and used them to create over 1,500 different products available at major retailers ranging from Walmart to Whole Foods Market. They take stuff like toothbrushes, chip bags, and drink pouches and make them into cool new eco-friendly products. For example, drink pouches can be everything from fences to purses and pencil cases. Want to get involved? You or your organization can sign up to be part of a Brigade, and start sending them waste. Not only do you help the environment, you can also earn points to get gifts or even a monetary contribution for your non-profit group.

Building awareness about environmental concerns is one thing. Getting people to actually change their behaviors and become better stewards of the environment themselves is quite another, and much more difficult to accomplish as University of Illinois students in Ming Kuo's Environmental Psychology class learned. They worked in groups to evaluate programs that promote environmental sustainability and make recommendations for how the programs could improve their effectiveness. According to Kuo, the student groups were paired with actual clients, making the project not just an assignment for a grade, but a real-world problem to solve.

Everybody’s heard of recycling. but have you heard of Terracycling? TerraCycle is a company founded around ten years ago by a freshman at Princeton. Tom Szaky’s idea was to revolutionize how we think about waste…by eliminating it. TerraCycle began by producing organic fertilizer, packaging liquid worm poop in used soda bottles. Since then TerraCycle has grown into one of the fastest-growing green companies in the world. They create national recycling systems for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste.

TERRACYCLE has been reusing waste for over a decade, giving it back to the consumer in the form of backpacks, non biohazardous cleaning products, scrapbooks, enviornmentally friendly fertilizers, and more. Check out this IPAD case made from what TERRACYCLE terms “upcycled” materials (think potato chip bags, and cliff bar wrappers). Triple nice!

Students at Oakmont Regional High have raised money selling craft items like bracelets made from soda can tabs. They also have an account with TerraCycle and collect 2 cents for every snack wrapper they turn in. "That's our cash cow," said Archangelo. She said the school has embraced the program and every classroom has a box to collect wrappers for chips, granola bars, yogurt, along with glue sticks and tape dispensers. Club members spend a lot of hours sorting, folding and stacking the empty plastic wrappers.

PTO is excited to announce that our school is going GREEN! We teamed up with a program called TERRACYCLE.  We are going to be collecting a number of items to recycle and earn CASH.  Each classroom will have a bin to place collected items, which may be brought from home or just saved from lunch/snacks at school.  Please consider getting involved as we strive to make God’s creation a beautiful masterpiece one community at a time.  Below is a list of all items we are going to collect.  PTO will keep everyone informed throw here as to our progress throughout the year.