One of the most littered items in the world are cigarette butts. At the beach, they’re especially easy to toss, put out and tuck into the sand, out of sight... If you do smoke, save your butts to dispose in a proper receptacle. Look out for the ones with the TerraCycle logo, which means the butts will be recycled.

One company helping to recycle discarded personal care and beauty products and packaging is L’Occitane. You can now walk into any L’Occitane store in the U.S. and Canada and drop off your bathroom empties for recycling, regardless of brand... TerraCycle’s Zero Waste Boxes are easy solutions you can use wherever you are. Pick from a variety of boxes, such as the Bathroom Separation or Personal Care Zero Waste Box, and send to TerraCycle when full.

Last year, TerraCycle collected tens of millions of cigarette butts from more than 50 cities in the U.S. alone. This year, it plans to exceed those numbers. Cigarette butts are the world's most littered item with nearly 4.5 trillion being tossed each year. Last year in the United States, it is estimated 1.69 billion pounds of butts ended up as toxic waste.

NOW, Bloomingdale, IL, an independent and family-owned manufacturer of natural products in the U.S. health food store channel, has partnered with recycling expert TerraCycle to divert NOW’s flexible packaging from landfills. The NOW Recycling Program enables consumers the opportunity to recycle their toothpaste tubes and flexible food and supplement pouches—items not accepted by most municipal recycling programs.

Toothpaste tubes and flimsy pouch packaging aren’t accepted by most municipal-run, curbside recycling programs, but NOW is giving customers the option to send back empty packaging of these types to get recycled through a partnership with New Jersey-based TerraCycle, which works with corporations, manufacturers, municipalities, and individual households to process hard-to-recycle materials.

In addition to cost, some people object to the amount of waste created by disposable products. While contact lenses and blister packs can't be recycled locally, they can be collected and periodically sent to TerraCycle for recycling. This program is sponsored by Bausch + Lomb, but all brands of lenses and blister packs are accepted. The cardboard boxes that lenses come in can simply be recycled as usual.

Q: What is Subaru's new recycling program?...A: Hudiburg Subaru in Oklahoma City is accepting "hard-to-recycle" items such as snack/candy wrappers, disposable cups/lids and coffee/tea/creamer pods to be transformed by our partner, TerraCycle, into useful items like park benches, playground equipment and more. The items created from the recycled materials then will be donated to community partners connected to the more than 540 Subaru retailers participating in the initiative.

Here are a few ideas that should help point you in the right directions. This is by no means a comprehensive list. Please add suggestions on our Facebook page and let other locals know other easy ways to avoid filling the landfill faster... Waste collected through the Terracycle program turns cigarettes and their plastic package wrappers into plastic pallets and compost.

Legendary entrepreneurs are intuitive category designers. To become one yourself, open your mind to the pain points, frustrations and foibles that drive your prospective buyers nuts... If you look at nature, there is no such thing as a useless output. And that was the "aha" moment for Hungarian-born entrepreneur Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, a company on a mission to eliminate waste.

One solution that solves the issue of space when disposing of spent bulbs is a drum-top bulb-crusher like the BulbEater... The BulbEater® captures the mercury with a 5-stage HEPA filtration system, safely locking hazardous mercury vapor in the carbon stage.