Teton Valley Community Recycling is proud to announce our new centrally-located Recycling Education Center in the GeoTourism Center in downtown Driggs. Thanks to a generous grant from the Youth Philanthropy program of the Community Foundation of Teton Valley and to volunteers, Lee and Kristie Eggebroton. The new installation has a brochure rack with current events and recycling information and a “Recycling in Teton County” slide show which will always have the most up to date and accurate information for locals and for visitors. For those of you who have watched it, it is indeed true that our county does not recycle plastic food containers, grey board, magazines, and books. All of these items go to the landfill. The small collection bins at the transfer station are there to prevent people from contaminating the recyclable plastic bottles and corrugated cardboard. These other materials either don’t have any buyers or the County doesn’t have enough room to store them in dry bales (magazines.) So, go ahead and throw your plastic food containers and grey board in the trash and bring your books and magazines to neighboring counties. It will save you and the county a lot of unnecessary sorting. At the new Recycling Education Center, you will also find special seasonal recycling collections, including the annual denim drive, holiday light strings, and other specialty items. This mini-recycling center is also home to our popular TerraCycle collections where you can drop off your dental waste (toothpaste tubes, old toothbrushes, floss packaging), clean foil energy bar wrappers, clean cereal bags, contact lenses/blister packs, and other hard to recycle materials. This collection is separate from standard recycling as it gets shipped back to the manufacturers to recycle in bulk instead of ending up in the landfill. Thanks again to the Youth Philanthropy students from Teton High School for funding our Recycling Education Center.

Can you imagine a world where the milkman still brings glass bottles of fresh dairy products to your doorstep and takes the empties back to be cleaned and reused? At first I was skeptical. But the more I think about it, the more I think the model can work. It doesn't have to be bad news for plastics processors. But it won't solve the industry's problems. Stay with me on this. Terracycle Inc. brought up the idea last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Terracycle is known for setting up recycling schemes for hard-to-recycle products, like cigarette butts and juice boxes. Some of the company's projects strike me as gimmicks, designed to take pressure off brand owners that sell unrecyclable products. At Davos, Terracycle announced a new service called Loop, which promises to use and collect reusable containers for a wide range of products. It's being touted as a replacement for single-use plastics packaging. Unilever plc and Procter & Gamble Co. are already signed up to participate, so expect to see products like refillable stainless steel deodorant sticks in select markets this spring. When I first read about Loop, I wondered how Unilever will sell deodorant packaged in stainless steel for the same price as product packaged in plastic. Not to mention the cost of picking up, cleaning and refilling the sticks. And if the price isn't the same, how many consumers will pay a premium for deodorant in stainless steel? It sounded like a gimmick. I was ready to write a column about the balance between convenience and sustainability and argue that convenience, which favors single-use plastics, will win. But the more I researched, the more I thought that this might be a few years ahead of its time, but it might work. After all, many consumers already get meal kits and groceries delivered to their doors. Why not encourage them to return the packaging through the same delivery system? There's no reason those vehicles have to return to the warehouse empty. Loop says it will use premium, durable packaging made from metal, glass and engineering plastics. If those are the choices, I like plastics' chances. Plastics have the edge when it comes to cost and carbon footprint. And when premium plastics containers have reached the end of their useful life span, they're easily recycled. All that said, Loop isn't going to solve the plastics industry's solid waste crisis. It's not going to collect fast food containers, cigarette butts or tampon applicators, which are among the most common trash items collected in beach cleanups. It's also not going to stop microplastics that come from laundering clothing. But it's a potentially encouraging development in what I expect will be a long effort to make consumers a little less comfortable with the idea of throwing away valuable plastics after only one use.

To solve the ever-growing problem of too much waste and plastic, a coalition of major consumer product manufacturers is borrowing an old-fashioned idea.

Most Care2 readers probably won’t remember the days when the milkman came to call each morning. He used to bring milk and cream in glass bottles, which customers used and then put outside for him to retrieve. Today, that idea is getting a fresh coat of paint. Thanks to a new marketing platform called Loop, the producers of many of the items you buy will market their goods in reusable, returnable stainless steel containers. That’s called zero-waste packaging, my friends, and its time has come. “While recycling is critically important, it is not going to solve waste at the root cause,” Tom Szaky, CEO and cofounder of TerraCycle, one of the partners behind Loop, told Fast Company. “To us, the root cause of waste is not plastic, per se, it’s using things once, and that’s really what Loop tries to change as much as possible.” There’s a lot of truth in that statement. We buy so much stuff these days because it’s convenient and single-serve. Yes, it’s plastic — but it’s not plastic’s fault. Our love affair with convenience has landed us in the mess the world now faces. Here’s how the Loop platform will work:

• Customers purchase products — anything from Dove deodorant to Haagen-Dazs ice cream — from Loop’s website
• The purchase includes a deposit for the container
• UPS, a Loop partner, will deliver the products to the customer’s home in a re-usable, compartmented tote
• As the products are used up, customers place the empty containers back into the tote
• When the tote becomes full, customers request a pickup via Loop’s website or drop off the tote at a UPS Store

Loop automatically replenishes the products a customer sends back, so the things you use all the time will come to you as you finish them. Loop calls it “the first subscription model that manages itself.” Each package is designed to be used at least 100 times. Use of that tote to move the products back and forth means there are no cardboard shipping boxes to get rid of — sorry, Amazon. Just consider the volume of garbage that will drop out of the waste stream if this model of packaging becomes the standard for the future. The array of brands participating in the Loop pilot program in New York City and Paris is remarkable. Here are only a few:

• Crest
• Seventh Generation
• Tide
• Clorox
• Pantene
• Nature’s Path Organic
• Hidden Valley
• Febreze

Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Danone, Mars Petcare, Mondelēz International and others will provide their products in reusable containers for Loop’s pilot program. Assuming all goes well, we can expect to see Loop roll this idea out to a broader geographic area. With a little luck, maybe zero-waste packaging will be the future of commerce. Sometimes old ideas are the best ideas, after all. Like the old song says — everything old is new again.

It’s been a long time since the “Trenton Makes, the World Takes” motto has meant much around these parts. But if the folks at Loop pull off what they’re attempting, then it’s fair to say the motto will mean more than ever. In fact, it would be ripe for an update, something along the lines of “Trenton Makes, the World Takes and Takes and Takes Again, in Fact They’ll Keep Taking Because That’s How We Buy Stuff Nowadays and Wow Can You Believe a Trenton Company is Responsible for Waste Free Packaging and More or Less Saving the Planet?” OK, fine, that’s a mouthful and probably needs some light edits, but the fact remains: Loop, which is owned by Terracycle and housed in the Terracycle offices in Trenton, has gone back in time to create waste free packaging. Think back to the old days, when the milkman dropped off your moo juice. This was before my time, but I get the idea: He’d drop off the bottles, you’d drink the milk, he’d pick up the bottles and give you more milk. Well, Loop is proposing to the same thing. For milk, sure. And ice cream. And toothpaste. And peanut butter. And garbage bags. And tin foil. And virtually every last kitchen, bath, and household item you can think of. And this isn’t some back-of-the-envelope scheme; already, Loop has signed up Nestle, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and dozens more companies, large and small, to get this party started. In the coming months, even more companies will announce plans to partner with Loop. You’ll be able to order direct from LoopStore.com, UPS will serve as the “milkman,” and within a few years, you’ll also be able to buy the products in stores. The phrase “game changer” gets tossed about a lot, but this one feels awfully game-changey. “We’re stopping and thinking and saying that even if 100 percent of products and packaging were recyclable, and even if 100 percent of products are made from recycled content, is that still the best?” said Anthony Rossi, the vice-president of Global Business Development at Loop. “Two years ago Tom (Szaky, Terracycle founder and CEO) got to thinking and said ‘no, we can’t stop there.’ One, it’s utopian. I don’t think we’ll ever get close to that number, but two the real problem here is disposability. And so we’re attacking disposability by working with partners to reengineer their packaging to be durable and reusable while providing infrastructure to get products to consumers and back.” The plan is pretty dang simple. You order you products, from Axe deodorant to Haagen-Dazs ice cream. It’s delivered, via UPS, in a Loop tote. When you’re done with your package, you put it back in the tote and leave on your doorstep. And that’s pretty much that. Instead of throwing away the packaging, you simply toss it in the tote. Couldn’t be easier. “People try to their best when they can, but when it’s convenience vs. sustainably, convenience wins,” Rossi noted. He’s right. I mean, I want to recycle, but … well, I don’t feel like going outside to toss the stuff in the can when my kitchen garbage is right here. But Loop negates that issue. “We want people to be able to live their life in Loop and have the opportunity to live a waste free life. We want to be that utopian, we want to be that far-reaching,” Rossi said. “In 50 years time, our goal - and this is super utopian - but we want our kids, our grandkids to look back at this period at human history and say, ‘what the hell were they doing?’ We want the idea of waste and disposability to be a blip. We want Loop to be the norm. Wherever products are being sold and consumed, we want those products to be in durable containers.” It’s going to happen. It’s the most obvious, easy answer. And when it does, and when Loop becomes the norm, always remember: It was born right here in Trenton. How about, “Trenton Reduces, the World Reuses?” Getting warmer, right?

As record high and low temperatures are being recorded all over the globe and unrecycled plastic waste continues to pile up in the middle in the ocean, almost forming and entire plastic continent in itself, it’s pretty obvious that time’s up and action is needed as soon as possible. Recycling waste on the same scale as we have been doing until now seems to be a solution that is not effective enough. There’s a need for a radical change in the way we consume and deal with our waste and this man, Tom Szaky, an author, CEO and an eco-revolutionary, is here with an idea that could change everything. – The Loop Project.

The old days of a milk man delivering fresh milk and then recollecting empty bottles again can return, but this time in a way more life-changing way

Tom Szaky, entrepreneur, author and an ecological warrior, recently came up with a game-changing idea

Image credits: Tom Szaky

Tired of the impossibility of avoiding plastic waste while using certain necessary products

He came up with an idea on how to make reusable and refillable packaging the new norm by presenting the Loop project

Image credits: loopstore_us

Loop will work in a way that can be summed up with: “shop and enjoy, then we pick up and refill”, just like with milk in the old days

Firstly, the goods that customers ordered online will be presented to their doorstep in a reusable Loop Tote bag

And once the items are used up, you just place the empty packaging back in the same Loop bag and request a free pick up so they could collect it, clean it and refill it with the same product

Here’s a simplified scheme of the whole groundbreaking novelty

Among 25 brands that have joined the project are Evian, Oral-B, Clorox, Gillette, Dove and others

The project will kick off in May 2019 with only 5,000 customers in Paris and New York City to test the idea

London, Tokyo, San Francisco and further expansion is planned in the future

If the whole initiative proves to be successful, more brands will be included in the catalog, which means more reusable packaging used by more people

Loop’s aim is to eliminate the idea of waste and if successful, this is going to one giant leap for humanity into a waste-free future

Local musicians are invited to attend a free recycle and restring event at Uptown Music in Salem, OR on Thursday, February 21, 2019 from 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM. Sponsored by D’Addario and TerraCycle, musicians can bring any old instrument strings for recycling and get their electric or acoustic guitars restrung with D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Bronze Acoustic strings. Old strings collected during the event will be recycled through Playback, D’Addario’s free, national recycling program.

TerraCycle's new circular shopping platform rescues big packaged brands from PR crisis Remember the sea turtle with a straw fused up its nose? The viral image that broke your heart and made you swear off straws? There’s more. On February 4, the UK’s RSPCA released the latest round of disturbing photos of wildlife – maimed seals, ducks, deer, even cats – ensnared in plastic bags, bottles and other snaggy remnants of our disposable economy. A flurry of British media headlines cut to the chase: record numbers of animals are killed or injured by plastic. It doesn’t take a PR insider to tell you that new reports of wildlife injured by plastic litter are sure to get packaged goods makers biting their nails and bracing for impact. With public outrage over disposable plastics growing steadily, major international brands have been under heavy pressure to rethink their packaging models. Over the last few months, the world’s largest consumer goods makers and sellers responded by announcing some surprisingly aggressive waste reduction targets. With some cajoling from the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, roughly 300 major corporations responsible for 20 per cent of the planet’s plastic packaging, including Unilever, Colgate, SC Johnson, H&M, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, signed onto a “new plastics economy” commitment. They’ve vowed to make sure all their plastic packaging is either recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025. The targets are impressive. They’re also, as shareholder advocacy group As You Sow noted, aspirational. Making your plastic packaging recyclable is one thing. Making sure it all gets recycled is another, particularly with global recycling infrastructure in a free fall, as China and now Malaysia and soon Vietnam shut their doors to the planet’s less desirable recycling scraps. (Not to mention that 90 per cent of plastic is never shipped off to be recycled to begin with, regardless of whether it’s technically recyclable). Compostable packaging targets get messy, too, when you consider that many cities with curbside composting, such as Toronto, reject most certified compostable packaging (like, say, compostable coffee pods) in their green bins because they’re, in a nutshell, not compatible with their systems. That leaves the most meaningful option – and the gateway to a truly circular economy – behind door number three: reusable. Deposit return systems on refillable drink containers, including beer or milk bottles, have been the golden child of the circular economy since, well, the golden era of the milkman. Other circular economy darlings have usually been limited to companies that make products that can be taken back and/or and refurbished, like an old Patagonia coat. The idea has never really gained traction with the make ‘n toss packaged good set – until now. Enter Loop’s new “circular shopping platform” – heralded as the 21^st century milkman. But instead of a milk truck, your friendly neighbourhood UPS driver will be tasked with dropping off (and picking up) a leak-proof reusable LOOP box filled with an array of popular brands like Pantene, Tide, Seventh Generation, Dove, Tropicana, Nature’s Path, Body Shop and more so people can get everything from mayonnaise to deodorant in branded stainless steel, glass and refillable plastic containers – all within 48 hours of ordering. Once you’re done, call UPS for pick-up and the containers will be returned to Loop for sanitation then to manufacturers for refill. It’s a conscious consumer’s dream. It also sounds like a lot of greenhouse gas-intensive shipping. TerraCycle, the company behind Loop has said it’s calculated the total impact of its shopping platform and says that, overall, Loop products are 50 to 75 per cent better for the environment than conventional alternatives. Usman Valiante has his doubts. The senior policy analyst with Corporate Policy Group LLP has been involved in rolling out producer take-back initiatives in B.C. and Ontario and cautions that early carbon footprint estimates often miss the mark: “If you look at the greenhouse gas footprint of Amazon, online shop was supposed to reduce the amount of truck trips, when it’s actually done the opposite.” It would be “fine, if the entire transportation system ran on renewable energy,” says Valiante. “But it’s not.” Loop has argued that while it might add more delivery trucks to the road, it’s system will ultimately involve fewer garbage trucks. It also plans to break into brick-and-mortar retail outlets in the future. Loop’s real world GHG numbers will be crunched further during its trial run in New York and Paris starting this May. If all goes well, Loop trials will be coming to Toronto, Tokyo, San Fran and London next to much fanfare. Many of Loop’s early brand partners could no doubt use some good press. Coco-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Nestle, Mars, Clorox, Mondelēz have all been slammed by Greenpeace as the world’s largest contributors to the ocean plastic crisis. Their branded packaging has been turning up in Greenpeace ocean trash audits from Asia to Canada. It’s actually why Loop’s creator, Toronto-raised and Jersey-headquartered Tom Szaky reportedly pitched those brands first. Partnering with Loop doesn’t just save them from a PR crisis and position them as innovators. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has also been drawing corporate players to the circular economy table with the promise of boosted brand loyalty and deeper data dives on consumers. As Institute for Smart Prosperity’s Stephanie Cairns points out to, when people sign up to have weekly deliveries of Haagen-Dazs [the only ice cream brand in the Loop store so far], Nestle doesn’t just get brand loyalty, it starts amassing specific data about exactly who’s eating its ice cream and when. “For a lot of brands, this a very attractive idea,” says Cairns. TerraCycle (founded in 2001) has always known the power of flipping the script on branded packaged goods. One of the recycling company’s earliest upcycled products involved transforming old branded juice pouches into new branded tote bags. Okay, so not everyone wants to sling a Luna-wrapper-turned-messenger bag over their shoulder. But with TerraCycle’s new Loop initiative, they’ve figured out a classier way to close the loop on disposables, working with consumer good companies to develop sleek, branded reusable containers, on which deposits will be paid. The concept should test well with well-heeled, urban Aspirationals – the 40 per cent of people who, according to BBMG, wan­­t to buy from companies that do good. Particularly those Aspirationals already doing a lot of online shopping and feeling guilty about their packaging trail. But not every consumer will want to or can afford to fork out $20 for shipping and up to $10 per container on a deposit, which throws a bit of a wrench in the reach and scaleability of the model. For others, no amount of shiny reusable packaging will scrub the tarnish from the Coca-Colas and Nestles of the world. Emily Charles-Donelson works with Toronto Tool Library and Sharing Depot, where customers can borrow items and refill their own soap containers. She’s worried that Mondelēz, Clorox and friends will be selling Millennials more of the same old problematic products in feel-good packaging. “Loop’s reusable container program has the potential to significantly amplify the growing culture of reuse, moving us away from the erroneous notion that recycling is a viable solution to the waste crisis,” says Charles-Donelson. “Zooming out, however, LOOP is a halfway solution dreamed up within the parameters of the same broken corporate narrative that fueled the environmental crisis in the first place.” Can we buy our way out of this mess? Probably not, especially if we’re buying disposable paper towels and sewer-clogging antibacterial wipes in refillable containers. But at least we’re starting to come to terms with the glaring reality that we can’t recycle our way out. Until we’ve figured out a new green economy that isn’t so deeply hinged on ever more consumption, the world needs Loop and others like it to catch on, do well, scale up beyond the 20,000 stainless steel tubs of Häagen-Dazs being piloted (humans, after all, buy 13 billion litres of ice cream every year) and to thrive as one of many circular economy solutions around the globe. Maybe more than anything, we need the Loops, Tool Libraries and Sharing Depots of the world to be supported by ambitious and binding circular economy regulations, along the lines of what we’re seeing in Europe and the UK (we’re waiting on you, Canada).  At the moment, Cairns says, “We [in Canada] don’t have a public policy framework that’s going to easily enable a [refillable] product to come into the market and be collected through regular waste pick-up streams and recirculated back to suppliers.” “The Loop model really highlights the defects in Canada’s current system,” says Cairns, but she points out it also shows the potential that’s out there “if we unleash creative thinking out-of-the-box thinking.”s  

Scott Cassel, the chief executive officer and founder of Product Stewardship Institute (PSI), Boston, has joined forces with Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of the Trenton, New Jersey-based waste solutions company TerraCycle, on the mission to eliminate waste. The two worked together on Szaky’s recently released fourth book, The Future of Packaging: From Linear to Circular, to offer a roadmap out of the the pileup of excessive waste through packaging redesign. More than 50 million tons of packaging and paper products are disposed of in the U.S. each year, representing a missed opportunity to recover valuable resources, PSI says. For over a decade, PSI says it has sought circular solutions by bringing stakeholders together to advance product stewardship for packaging with a focus on producer responsibility. PSI says Cassel's chapter in The Future of Packaging dives deeper into the rationale behind this approach and the benefits to be gained from holding brand owners responsible for reducing the impacts of their packaging choices. "By sharing diverse perspectives from governments, brand owners and waste management firms, this book powerfully transforms the issues we've avoided into ones we are motivated to tackle head-on," Cassel says. "My chapter calls for a paradigm shift in producer responsibility, placing waste and materials management in the hands of the producer as an asset, not a burden." Designed to be a primer on packaging design for the circular economy, The Future of Packaging integrates perspectives from Szaky and 15 innovators in sustainability - including government leaders, corporations and international waste management experts - to create a guide that PSI says can help everyone from a small startup to a large corporation move towards a future of growth with less waste. The co-authors for The Future of Packaging: From Linear to Circular are:

• Attila Turos, the former lead of the Future of Production Initiative at World Economic Forum
• Christine "Christie" Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• Jean-Marc Boursier, the group senior executive vice president of finance and recycling recovery in Northern Europe for SUEZ
• Scott Cassel, the founder and CEO of Product Stewardship Institute and president of Global Product Stewardship Council
• Stephen Sikra, the global lead for packaging material science and technology at Procter & Gamble
• Ron Gonen, the cofounder and managing partner of Closed Loop Partners and cofounder and former CEO of Recyclebank
• Michael Manna, the founder and managing director of organic recycling solutions
• Chris Daly, the chief sustainability officer of PepsiCo Western Europe
• Lisa McTigue Pierce, the executive editor of Packaging Digest
• Tony Dunnage, the group director of manufacturing sustainability with Unilever
• KoAnn Skrzyniarz, the founder and CEO of Sustainable Life Media and Sustainable Brands
• Raphael Bemporad and Liz Schroeter Courtney of BBMG
• Virginie Helias, the vice president of global sustainability at Procter & Gamble
• Lisa Jennings, the vice president of global hair acceleration at Procter & Gamble

"Acknowledging the tall order of changing course away from climate catastrophe means addressing it from several angles," Szaky says. "I have had the privilege to co-author this book with the best minds in the global packaging movement—folks who have been championing this new frame of thinking for decades. Together, they provide the tools for anyone, consumer to corporation, interested in innovating upwards out of this mess and into abundance." Called "a crash course for designing for the circular economy" by Unilever CEO Paul Polman, The Future of Packaging contextualizes the historical and economic factors that spurred modern society's "business as usual" preoccupation with disposability, explains the current state of manufacturing, recycling, and resource management and encourages critical thinking about the true function of packaging. Topics include the evolution of plastic and recommendations and "watch-outs" for producing and consuming in the circular economy. For instance, biodegradable and bio-based plastics may not be as sustainable as marketed, black plastics are typically non-recyclable, and though lighter in weight, packaging such as pouches and cartons also take a toll on the planet. To learn more about PSI's work to advance producer responsibility for packaging and paper products, visit www.productstewardship.us/Packaging.