Soooo many candy wrappers, sitting in a pile in the trash...but wait, you can recycle them thanks to our friends at Loggerhead Marinelife Center!   JUNO BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — Loggerhead Marinelife Center's "Unwrap the Waves" program is back for this Halloween season. The center and several other organizations in the area will be collecting candy wrappers to 100 percent recycle.   According to the Environmental Protection Agency, plastic packaging accounts for 30 percent of the U.S.’s solid waste every year.   The center will collect candy wrappers and send them to TerraCycle, who will recycle the wrappers since a majority of recycling centers don't accept candy wrappers. Last year, the "Unwrap the Waves" program collected 19,000 wrappers. Wrappers can be dropped off at Loggerhead Marinelife Center, Manatee Lagoon, FAU Pine Jog Environmental Education Center, Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, Inc., and Sandoway Discovery Center.   Twenty-nine Palm Beach County schools are also collecting wrappers. Candy wrappers are being collected now through November 11.

Earlier this month, Rubicon Global, a technology company born in the waste and recycling industry, launched its very first "Trick or Trash" Halloween campaign, a free recycling-awareness program for educators across the United States. The idea was to provide teachers and educators with a recycling and circular economy lesson plan, as well as a Candy and Snack Wrappers Zero Waste Box through TerraCycle to keep Halloween candy and snack wrappers out of landfills by diverting them into recycling streams. According to industry data, Americans purchase nearly 600 million pounds of candy for Halloween. It was smashing success. The free program had more than 450 teachers in 49 states plus the District of Columbia sign up in less than a month. One of those schools in Illinois was our very own Gemini Middle School in Niles. Seventh-grade teacher Beverly Mendoza, who signed up for the "Trick or Trash" program, said "I was taught to recycle from a young age, but more recently I've noticed that there are many cities and neighborhoods that still don't provide recycling, and that is a shame. There are over 1,100 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in my middle school. Students chew gum daily. They go through tons of wrappers within a week, and most of those wrappers end up in the trash. We do a lot within our school to recycle paper, plastic bottles, and are even collecting bottle caps to send to a company that will create a bench out of them for the school. This Trick or Trash program from Rubicon is a great extension of our existing recycling and sustainability efforts and we are excited to be a part of it."  

US-based nutrition provider Gerber and recycling company TerraCycle have partnered to recycle baby food packaging across the country.   The two companies are individually committed to eliminate waste and enable customers to recycle baby food packaging via TerraCycle.   To join the programme, customers need to enroll on the Gerber Recycling Program page. Then, they can send non-municipally recyclable packaging.   The packaging will be collected, cleaned and converted into hard plastic. The recycled plastic can be reused to produce new recycled items.   Interested individuals, schools, offices or community organisations can participate in the programme.   TerraCycle CEO and founder Tom Szaky said: “Through this free recycling programme, Gerber is offering parents an easy way to divert waste from landfills by providing a responsible way to dispose of certain hard-to-recycle baby food packaging.   “By collecting and recycling these items, families can demonstrate their respect for the environment not only through the products that they choose for their children but also with how they dispose of the packaging.”   To encourage participation in the programme, customers will be rewarded $1 for every pound of packaging waste sent.   The reward will go to a non-profit, school or charitable organisation of the collector’s choice.   Gerber president and CEO Bill Partyka said: “We know every parent’s top priority is to ensure a healthy, happy future for their baby. Our commitment to sustainability is rooted in giving parents a hand in making their baby’s future that much brighter.”   Earlier this month, TerraCycle collaborated with health and hygiene company RB to enable customers to recycle their consumer goods packaging.

Nestlé-owned Gerber has announced that it is partnering with the TerraCycle recycling program in the US to help repurpose hard-to-recycle packaging to keep it out of the landfill. The program will allow consumers to mail Gerber packaging that can't be accepted through municipal collection programs to help transform it into new products upon being melted down. Consumers can use a prepaid shipping label to partake in the free program and help do their part to keep simple-use plastics functional. The TerraCycle recycling program partnership with Gerber was touted by TerraCycle CEO and Founder Tom Szaky who said, "Through this free recycling programme, Gerber is offering parents an easy way to divert waste from landfills by providing a responsible way to dispose of certain hard-to-recycle baby food packaging. By collecting and recycling these items, families can demonstrate their respect for the environment not only through the products that they choose for their children, but also with how they dispose of the packaging.”  

WATCHUNG - Valley View Middle School teacher Morgan Pestorius attended the Earth Education for Sustainable Societies workshop at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., earlier this month.   The goal of this three-day workshop was to bring together thought leaders in the environmental education community to articulate high-priority needs surrounding earth education.   Participation was determined through a competitive application process. Attendees included informal educators, K-12 educators and university-level formal educators.   Pestorius is a leader in sustainability at Valley View. She oversees various recycling programs including those offered by Trex, Terracycle, and ColorCycle.

Rubicon Global and TerraCycle, both companies dedicated to managing and eliminating waste, recently teamed up to run a Halloween recycling initiative. The “Trick or Trash” campaign provides free lesson plans about recycling and the circular economy to elementary and middle-school teachers, along with bins, called Zero Waste Boxes, for recycling candy and snack wrappers accumulated by students during their trick or treating forays.   “Were tying it to Halloween because it definitely gets the kids’ attention,” says TerraCycle spokesperson Sue Kauffman. “It’s a perfect opportunity to teach some really important lessons about a topic that is really important to kids.”   While exact numbers of participating teachers haven’t been tallied yet, according to Kauffman, interest apparently has been high. Due to an unexpectedly enthusiastic response, the campaign had to end the box giveaway a few days early. Teachers and principals from more than 40 U.S. states signed up, more than doubling the anticipated number.   Those still interested in owning a Zero Waste Box can buy one on TerraCycle or Rubicon’s web sites. And the free lessons plans are still available. The initiative is being run through Rubicon’s site.   According to Rubicon, a whopping $2.6 billion will be spent on candy this year. Americans buy nearly 600 million pounds of candy for Halloween.   The lesson plans focus on what happens to all that candy waste after it’s tossed into recycling bins—what can and can’t be recycled, why you need to separate different types of waste, the merits of reusable packaging vs. single use, lifestyle changes that can lead to less trash and so on. “For a lot of people, when they throw things in the blue bin, it’s out of sight, out of mind,” says Kauffman. “They don’t really know what happens.”   Students are tasked with dropping off their candy wrappers and related waste after Halloween is over. Once the box is full, teachers can ship the box back to TerraCycle with a prepaid label. The company will then recycle the waste.   Atlanta, Ga-based Rubicon Global is a tech company focused on helping businesses, cities, individuals and haulers manage waste and become more sustainable. TerraCycle is a recycling and waste management pioneer, based in Trenton, NJ. It also recently launched Loop, which works with retailers and manufacturers to sell containers and other receptacles that are reused.   As for the Halloween initiative, according to Kauffman, it’s all about focusing on what students can do to change behavior and reduce waste. “If anything is going to change, you have to change the next generation,” she says.

We need to talk about Halloween candy.   Public awareness of our plastic pollution crisis is at a high, plastic straws and bags are getting banned in cities and states across the country, and yet there has been almost no discussion about the massive environmental problem that Halloween candy creates.   Americans will buy approximately 600 million pounds of Halloween candy this year, spending $2.6 billion on bite-sized candy bars and bags of candy corn. After the holiday, nearly all the wrappers and packages from these confections will end up in landfills, where they’ll sit around for decades or more.   Candy wrappers are very hard to recycle. Like most food wrappers and packages, candy wrappers are not meant to be mixed with bottles and cans and sent to a sorting facility. “They are too small for our equipment to sort,” said John Hambrose, communications manager at Waste Management Inc., one of the largest sanitation companies in the U.S. Most curbside recycling programs prioritize capturing rigid plastics like bottles, jugs and materials that are at least the size of a credit card.   And it’s not just size that’s a problem. It’s what candy wrappers are made from.   “There are so many varieties of candy out there and equally abundant are the types of wrappers,” Jeremy Walters, sustainability manager for Republic Services, another major waste disposal company, told HuffPost in an email. “Though some wrappers feel like paper, they often have a ‘waxy’ or ‘poly-coating,’ leaving it unfit to be mixed with paper for recycling.”   Recycling systems aren’t designed to capture and sort wrappers “because they have little dollar value,” said Nick McCulloch, senior manager of sustainability at Rubicon Global, a waste reduction tech company.   “Recycling is in part about economics — the value of the raw materials you’re collecting needs to exceed the cost of collecting them. Candy wrappers make that math hard because they’re made from low-value plastics,” he told HuffPost. “You’d have to collect tens of thousands of wrappers to help make those economics work.” Nevertheless, a few small efforts exist to curb the waste associated with hard-to-recycle materials like candy wrappers.   In September, HuffPost reported on the launch of the first municipal program in the country that encourages residents to throw flexible plastics, including candy wrappers, in the recycling bin. Eight thousand households in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, are participating so far, and nearby communities will join the experiment by the end of the year. The area uses a recycling facility with the advanced technology to deal with flexible plastics. Most facilities around the country would need millions of dollars to upgrade their equipment.   This month, recycling company TerraCycle and tech company Rubicon Global partnered to launched a “Trick or Trash” program for Halloween candy wrappers. Initially, school teachers and students could request a free recycling box before the holiday; and once the box was full, they’d return it to TerraCycle, which cleans and breaks down the wrappers to be made into new items. But due to overwhelming demand in more than 40 states, the companies had to stop sending out free boxes. Schools can still purchase a recycling box for snack and candy wrappers, but they’ll have to pay TerraCycle $81 to cover the costs associated with recycling these items.   Some food manufacturers have begun to experiment with wrappers made from recyclable materials. In the U.K., Nestlé recently launched its first recyclable paper packaging for a snack bar. The company did not respond when HuffPost asked whether it planned to use this new packaging on other products.   Walters told HuffPost that he worries about this so-called recyclable paper packaging.   “In theory it is a step in the right direction, but ultimately the biggest issue with this packaging is going to be contamination,” Walters wrote. “If you love chocolate as much as I do, you probably have experienced the Earth-shattering disappointment of opening up your chocolate bar and realizing it melted in your bag over the course of the day. Think about the sticky, chocolatey mess inside that wrapper. If that new ‘recyclable’ type of wrapper is soiled with chocolate or other food materials it cannot be mixed with paper grades coming out of the modern-day recycling center.” So what’s an environmentally conscious trick-or-treater to do?   In the zero-waste Facebook group of which I’m a member, I asked if folks had alternatives to Halloween candy wrapper hell. Several members said they went out of their way to hand out plastic-free treats ― like playing cards made from paper, compostable chewing gum from a plastic-free store, or classic Halloween favorites that come in paper containers (like Nerds, Lemonheads and Milkduds).   “If we all make it a point to support companies and brands who are really tackling the problem of disposability and taking steps to find solutions, we can force meaningful change,” said Sue Kauffman, North American public relations manager of TerraCycle.   Waste Management’s Hambrose agreed, saying that people can make a difference “by purchasing products that use less packaging and recycled materials,” and by sharing their concerns with elected officials.   Individual actions won’t get us very far so long as companies keep churning out candy in single-use packaging, according to Greenpeace representative Perry Wheeler. “It’s time to rethink how we are delivering these products while still making it enjoyable for children,” Wheeler said.   “It is overwhelming to enter the Halloween aisle this time of year and think about where all of this plastic will end up — polluting our oceans, waterways, or communities,” he added. “The cost of inaction on our throwaway culture is just too high to ignore.”   One member of the Facebook group said this is not an issue their household bothers to tackle, despite working toward a waste-free lifestyle. “I have no solutions,” they wrote. “We just deal the best we can.” They added that they try to limit the number of houses they visit to collect less candy in the first place.   Another option is extreme action, like banning all unrecyclable food packaging, not just candy wrappers. Such an effort, however, would not only be unpopular, and therefore unlikely to gain political traction; it’d be tough to enact and enforce.   Bans on plastic straws and shopping bags are highly controversial, and there isn’t a consensus yet on how effective they are. Research published earlier this year found that California’s ban on plastic shopping bags might be driving up sales of plastic garbage bags. And bans on plastic straws have proved difficult to implement.   When we asked Hambrose whether a gigantic trash-hauler and recycler like Waste Management would favor a potential ban on candy wrappers, he was aghast.   “Waste Management would never get between a trick-or-treater and a candy bar,” Hambrose said. “We can’t think of anything more horrifying.”   If it matters to you, it matters to us. Support HuffPost’s journalism here. For more content and to be part of the “This New World” community, follow our Facebook page.   HuffPost’s “This New World” series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com

Eating healthy has never tasted so good or been so conveniently affordable like Harvest Snaps.   Harvest Snaps are passionately crafted from green peas, black beans or red lentils, all farm-picked vegetables in Calbee North America. Harvest Snaps are not only appetizing but they’re healthier than most snacks with 30-60% less fat and average only 130-140 calories per 22 crisps. Free from pesky artificial flavors, colors, cholesterol and common allergens such as soy, nuts, wheat and eggs, these bite-sized delights pack in 4-5g of plant-based protein, 3-5g of fiber, plus a dose of calcium and potassium in every serving.   Harvest Snaps makes healthy eating fun again with 10 mouth-watering flavors. Treat your taste buds with Southern Style BBQ, Lightly Salted, White Cheddar, Parmesan Roasted Garlic, Caesar, Tomato Basil, Wasabi Ranch, Black Pepper, Mango Chile Lime, or Habanero.   But wait, it gets better, try switching up your usual routine dinners by making your very own gluten-free chicken strips. Use the Harvest Snaps Snacks Crisps as a substitute for bread crumbs to create a uniquely satisfying crunch without wheat. Everyone will be eager to find out your new receipt, it’s perfect for work parties, celebrations, and gatherings with friends and family.     Every Harvest Snap package is a part of the TerraCycle recycling program. This program is led by Calbee North America to help save the planet by reducing waste and giving back to charity. Learn more about how to participate. Visit your local grocery, drugstore, or natural food store to pick up your new favorite snack, Harvest Snaps.   Whether you’re on the plane, binge-watching your favorite Netflix show, taking a lunch break, or selecting your midnight snack, Harvest Snaps are the perfect treat for any occasion.

Consumers Can Now Recycle Baby Food Packaging Through TerraCycle® ARLINGTON, Va., Oct. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Gerber, the early childhood nutrition leader, has partnered with international recycling company TerraCycle® to help give hard-to-recycle baby food packaging a new life. This partnership is rooted in Gerber and TerraCycle®'s shared values around eliminating waste and supports the recovery of hard-to-recycle baby food packaging on a national scale. Participation in the program is easy – parents can simply sign up on the Gerber Recycling Program page at https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/gerber and mail in packaging that is not municipally recyclable using a prepaid shipping label. Once collected, the packaging is cleaned and melted into hard plastic that can be remolded to make new recycled products.   "Through this free recycling program, Gerber is offering parents an easy way to divert waste from landfills by providing a responsible way to dispose of certain hard-to-recycle baby food packaging," said TerraCycle CEO and Founder, Tom Szaky. "By collecting and recycling these items, families can demonstrate their respect for the environment not only through the products that they choose for their children, but also with how they dispose of the packaging."   As an added incentive, for every pound of packaging waste sent to TerraCycle through the Gerber Recycling Program, collectors can earn $1 to donate to a non-profit, school or charitable organization of their choice.   Gerber believes the baby food industry should help create a world where babies thrive, and this partnership is one of many steps toward its goal to achieve 100% recyclable or reusable packaging by 2025. "We're thrilled to partner with TerraCycle as part of our broader sustainable packaging efforts," said Gerber President and CEO Bill Partyka. "We know every parent's top priority is to ensure a healthy, happy future for their baby. Our commitment to sustainability is rooted in giving parents a hand in making their baby's future that much brighter."   Gerber was founded on the ambition to give babies the best start in life. That's why their work doesn't stop at nutrition. As the world's largest baby food company, Gerber has upheld some of the industry's strongest agricultural standards through its Clean Field Farming™ practices, and is committed to reducing energy use, water use and carbon emissions in its factories.   The Gerber Recycling Program is open to any interested individual, school, office, or community organization. For more information on TerraCycle's recycling programs, visit www.TerraCycle.com.

Gerber, the early childhood nutrition leader, has partnered with international recycling company Terracycle® to help give hard-to-recycle baby food packaging a new life. This partnership is rooted in Gerber and TerraCycle's shared values arund eliminating waste and supports the recovery of hard-to-recycle baby food packaging on a national scale.