UpCycle currently works with TerraCycle, an internationally-recognized recycling and upcycling company. It works with different manufacturers in an effort to repurpose various materials and provides UpCycle with pre-paid shipping labels to send out the materials the initiative collects.

Sponsored by Tom’s of Maine® and TerraCycle®, a company that provides free waste collection programs for hard-to-recycle materials and turns them into green programs, the Tom’s of Maine Natural Care Brigade® provides the practice's patients and the general community with an easy way to recycle oral health products. Toothpaste tubes and caps, toothbrushes, floss containers, mouthwash bottles and caps, deodorant containers and soap packaging, regardless of brand, are accepted.

The university also recently started a partnership with Terracycle, an international upcycling and recycling company, in order to enhance the recycling program already in place.

6. TerraCycle, a company that provides recycling solutions for spent coffee pods, has teamed up with Tassimo, Mars Drinks, Nespresso and Illy, but despite reaching out to the company multiples times, has not be able to develop a relationship with Green Mountain (Keurig).

Last year, the GUSA Senate Sustainability Subcommittee started Georgetown’s extension of the initiative, Terracycle, on our campus. Terracycle specializes in recycling objects that aren’t able to be recycled through traditional recycling programs. Terracycle can recycle objects like Brita filters, ink jet and toner cartridges, cosmetics, toothbrushes, deodorant, shampoo bottles, or almost anything that can be found in the bathroom. Drop-off bins have just recently been expanded to every freshmen dorm and Hilltoss in the Healey Family Student Center.

“We want to bring new things to the children. It’s not just science. There’s the exhibit by Terracycle. There are the edible bugs. You can eat bugs. Maybe not in this culture, but in other cultures they eat bugs,” she said.

As simple as that: Pens don't have to end up in the bin no more, instead they can be recycled by an environmental enterprise for a good purpose. Just collect your empty pens in a box of your choice which you can send to TerraCycle for free and in exchange you'll get 2 centimes for each item, that you can donate to the charitable organization of your choice.

Is there a role for government in outsmarting waste? Instead of voluntary EPR programs (such as TerraCycle has innovated), should there be an expansion of mandatory EPR laws? Should other laws or policies require producers to take more responsibility for the waste that their products generate and for the environmental impact associated with that waste?  

Tom Szaky, explores why the garbage crisis exists and explains how we can solve it by eliminating the very idea of garbage. To outsmart waste, Szaky says, we first have to understand it, then change how we create it and finally rethink what we do with it. The following excerpt from the introduction, teaches us that waste need not be the final stage.

Terracycle to the rescue again!