One thing that I really like about the brand is that they care about the environment and found a unique way to recycle and repurpose the pouches. Pouches can be sent to a company called TerraCycle who turns the pouches into useful products like lunch totes and bags.

TerraCycle accepts waste that is harder to categorize and items you probably didn’t realize you could recycle, such as old make-up containers, cheese packaging, shampoo bottles, etc. The lists of things you can recycle is quite extensive and really makes a difference in the amount of “trash” you throw away each month.

Chesnut Charter Elementary is starting off the new year by participating in the TerraCycle’s Drink Pouch Brigade. The goal of TerraCycle, an international upcycling and recycling company, is to eliminate the idea of waste by creating collection and solution programs for all kinds of typically non-recyclable waste.

The center had, for three years, participated in the Candy Wrapper Brigade, a TerraCycle program that provided free waste collection for hard-to-recycle materials. The program also awarded points, redeemable for charitable giving, for each wrapper collected and covered the cost of shipping the wrappers to be recycled.

“TerraCycle currently engages more than 20 million people at 90,000 locations in over 20 countries, to collect non-recyclable waste. TerraCycle then turns the collected waste into a wide variety of products and materials. Collection locations include schools, offices, community groups and a wide variety of other organizations as well as homes.”

The group is also working with Terracycle who is a company that pays for trash that is not locally recyclable. Harris expressed interest in setting up a compost site at the gardens where compost will be collected and this fertilizer would be available to the participants. Along with traditional gardening raised beds and vertical gardening are other options that will be made available.

Bridgestone Arena has become among the first venues in the country to collect and recycle used cigarette butts. Following their collection, cigarette butts in the TerraCycle program are recycled into various products, with most being turned into plastic pallets for industrial usage.

Through a partnership with the Nashville Clean Water Project, Bridgestone Arena is set to become one of the first venues in North America to collect and recycle used cigarette butts. Nashville Clean Water Project’s new recycling program, The Cigarette Waste Brigade®, is a partnership program with the international upcycling and recycling company TerraCycle, which takes difficult-to-recycle-packaging and turns it into affordable, innovative products.

"We send our plastic bags, wrappers, Capri Sun containers to Terra Cycle in New Jersey. They pay us for it and then they use it to make other things people can use," explained Ashlynn Moffat, another third-grader on the Green Team at the elementary school in Ms. Burke's class.