Every child learns about recycling in school, but Sonja Krawesky’s Grade Three class at St. Patrick’s Catholic School are taking that concept to a whole new level. The class recently took top honours in TerraCycle Canada’s “Design a Box That Rocks” competition, which encourages teams nationwide to design and create an innovative TerraCycle waste collection station in order to “upcycle” over sighted waste materials. The program, only initiated at Saint Patrick’s last fall after hearing about it at the Toronto Homes Show, is wildly successful with the students.

The Queen Elizabeth School’s Knights of the Green Table eco club has once again taken the second runner-up prize in TerraCycle Canada’s recent Winter Trash to Cash waste collection contest, which recognizes the top collectors of TerraCycle’s numerous waste streams from across Canada during a two-month period.

I read an interesting post last weekend, where the blogger had just received a new Tassimo Drink machine. Caite, at A Lovely Shore Breeze, left me a message reminding me that it was at her blog that I read that post.  I mentioned that I use my machine as a hot water source.  A few readers mentioned that they had not considered doing that.  In this post I am going to expand on my comments on that blog.

Out of all the entries from across the entire country William S. Patterson School in Clandeboye is the ‘little engine that could’, as the school was announced the first runner-up in the TerraCycle Canada Design a Box that Rocks Contest.

The pen is a marvellous invention, but when it has done its job it still ends up in the garbage. One more non-recyclable item journeys to the landfill. In the US, 1.6 billion meet that fate each year. Recycling pens poses big problems. Even though a good portion of a pen is plastic, it is usually several different kinds of plastic, usually contaminated with a bit of metal or an ink core or some other materials.