Ella’s Kitchen Organic Baby Food has a vast selection of diverse and tasteful baby food that will expand your baby’s palate. They have flavors such as….Very, Very Tasty Vegetable Bake with Lentils, Carrots, Apples + Parsnips, or Sweet Potatoes, Pumpkin, Apples + Blueberries. To top it off, you can and earn money for a charity, school or nursery of your choice by recycling the pouches with with TerraCycle®.

The district provides between $150 and $200 a year for Eagle Valley Elementary to buy balls and physical education equipment for students. P.E. teacher Joel Huebner was looking to expand that budget through donations, when three years ago, he bought Capri Sun drink pouches for his child's soccer team and saw an ad on the package about schools being paid to recycle drink pouches and chip bags through a company called TerraCycle. TerraCycle was created in 2001 when then-20-year-old Princeton University freshman Tom Szaky began packaging liquid worm fertilizer in used soda bottles. Today, TerraCycle has grown into one of the fastest-growing green companies in the world, according to its website. The company makes dozens of products from the recycled trash, including a lunch box made of Capri Sun packages and CD jewel cases made of Cheetos packages. Not only was the school able to buy new balls, but also equipment for lawn bowling, badminton and indoor bocce ball for winter. Terracycle has recycled 2.5 billion pieces of trash gathered by volunteers since 2001, paying out $5.5 million to charities, according to the company website.    

A student of the University of Maine, Jediah Scott, was recognized for his achievements after a semester of assisting with a series of community initiatives. Scott was acknowledge for his participation with TerraCycle, a non profit organization located in Trenton, New Jersey. Scott worked with the TerraCycle Recycling Program to develop a digital portfolio of information for the initiative, which expands recycling opportunities for local businesses and institutions. After concluding a semester-long internship with the UMF Partnership for Civic Advancement program, he received a UMF-Bangor Savings Bank Intern Award.

Going to the toothbrush aisle can be almost as intimidating as going to the cosmetic section in the drugstore with so many choices in your line of sight. I was pretty excited when the decision was made for me by TOM’S OF MAINE’s PR when they sent me the new Naturally Clean toothbrush to try out. Like I would imagine, the handle is made of a recyclable plant-based handle that is made from renewable castor oil plants instead of petroleum. And something I never thought about, toothbrushes are not recyclable! But these are through their TerraCycle collection program, which you can learn about here. I like that!   And this one seems to stack up with the other major brands like having a angled neck and multi-level bristles. Something they add is the handle is dye-free and contains no BPAs (a chemical that makes plastics last for 25+ years and found it everything you see every day) or artificial colors. Choose from Soft or Medium for $3.99 @ tomsofmaine.com.

Parent Kristina Schultz Tanner had this to say about Mrs. Hughes: “When guided by an excellent teacher, enthusiasm towards education itself can be contagious! My daughter has had the unique opportunity to be a student of Mrs. Audrey Hughes, who motivates her students to explore science on a practical level, especially with her after-school Science and Energy Team work. In a mere matter of months, she has transformed a handful of students into an energized organization that is actively working to educate others about recycling and energy conservation as they themselves learn through trips to the ACC Recycling Center, joining Terracycle and spearheading a school wide recycling campaign, and even seeing a local farm and learning how food is produced and distributed to grocery stores.

The G. Ray Bodley High School Environmental Club is about to undertake yet another world saving task, upcycling. Upcyling was an idea that was brought to the club by sophomore Cayla Weaver. The concept is an offshoot of the old saying, "one man's trash is another man's treasure."

 

The club will work with the company Terracycle to take Bodley's trash such as candy wrappers, juice boxes, and chip bags and make it into something useable like bags, benches, notebooks, and pencil cases. The best part of this arrangement, besides the obvious beneficial impacts to the environment, is that a portion of the profits earned from the resulting goods goes to a non-profit charity or school of the organizers choice.

The donations will be collected by the club and packaged and shipped back to the company to be upcycled into new goods. The products are divided into "brigades" based on their type. The brigades range from the obvious chip bags to the unexpected designer handbag brigade. All of the products created by the upcycled goods can be purchased on the TerraCycle website where customers can literally purchase a notebook made out of recycled chip bags for only 8.99 to take math notes in. And who knows, maybe that good karma will come in handy when working on homework and quizzes; it certainly can't hurt.

This year’s Riverkeeper Sweep, a day of service for the Hudson River, is expected to attract as many as 1,000 volunteers to help clean up more than 150 miles of shoreline in more than 60 locations on the Hudson River and its tributaries. Riverkeeper has joined TerraCycle’s Cigarette Waste Brigade to recycle cigarette butts and related cigarette waste collected during the cleanup. Each cleanup is organized by volunteers with Riverkeeper’s support, and each volunteer group may recycle not only cigarette butts, but additional categories of waste, such as chip bags and candy wrappers. The public is encouraged to volunteer by registering at www.riverkeeper.org/sweep. For more info on TerraCycle, visithttp://www.terracycle.com.

The second annual Riverkeeper Sweep, a day of service to clean up the shores along the Hudson River, will have its headquarters at Go Green! Greenpoint! This year, Riverkeeper has teamed with recycling pioneer TerraCycle to recycle cigarette butts into industrial products such as pallets or railroad ties. Additional waste, such as chip bags and candy wrappers, will be recycled as well.

The Compass School in Kingston has been named a 2013 Green Ribbon school by the U.S. Department of Education for its environmental efforts.

Sustainability practices include packing no-waste lunches, regular silverware, and reusable water bottles.  Documents are printed on both sides of paper and scrap paper is used for math and art, and shredded for use as bedding in worm compost bins and the chicken coop.  Students constructed a bin for Compass families to use for recycling supermarket plastic bags, and another bin is used to collect and send recyclable materials to Terracycle.  In art and music students make instruments and sculptures from natural and recycled materials.  According to parents, this concern for good sustainability practices has carried over into home practices.

The Garden State Green Awards, also known as the “Boggies,” honor individuals and organizations that have made a significant contribution to the environment, demonstrating that we can indeed “Save the Planet, One Person at a Time.” Garden State Green Awards will honor nine of the state’s “greenest citizens” and organizations at the sixth annual Greenfest to be held May 17-18 at Kean University in Union. Individual Student: Lindsey Van Zile, Toms River High School South, for her tireless efforts at school and in her community. She has volunteered as a Beach Sweep Captain for Clean Ocean Action and formed a “Pine Beach Clean Team”. Lindsey introduced the TerraCycle program to the Borough of Pine Beach and the elementary school. She also secured a grant to fund a Native Plant Garden on vacant borough land which is scheduled for completion this spring.