There is a popular topic that I like to tackle every so often. It's how to recycle items that may be a bit tricky. Never fear, you can Do Your Part to find eco-friendly solutions. Here are few items that I get asked about and ways you can get them all responsibly recycled. Toothpaste Tubes and Toothbrushes How many tubes of toothpaste do you think you've thrown in the trash after you've gotten that last squeeze? What about old toothbrushes? Once you're done with them there are ways to get them recycled. In fact, Terracycle will pay for you to send them in. From there, they are made into plastic pellets that can then be molded into everything from playground equipment to garden tools. Do Your Part and to get your trickiest of items recycled. It's actually a whole lot easier than you might have thought.

Alfredo Robles, the school custodian, has spent many hours coming up with a new layout for the area and has even built a scale model to show how beautiful and shady the eating area will be for the students to enjoy lunch. To raise money for the project, the students will collect old cell phones for the entire month of March and will send them to TerraCycle, which will recycle the phones and send the school a check. Proceeds from the cell phone drive, along with additional funds from Nipomo Elementary School PTA and other events in the works, will allow them to get started on the project in April. They hope to have much of it completed by the end of the school year. So, go through your drawers and find your old cell phones to donate for this good cause. Old cell phones can be dropped off in the school office during school hours in March.

Candy Wrappers – Candy wrappers cannot be recycled in your bin, but they don’t have to be thrown out with the trash. TerraCycle, a national mail-in recycling program, allows large organizations such as schools to collect and mail-in certain types of waste for points that can be redeemed to benefit non-profit organizations and schools. To learn more about candy wrapper recycling through TerraCycle, visit http://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/candy-wrapper-brigade-r.html.

Candy Wrappers – Candy wrappers cannot be recycled in your bin, but they don’t have to be thrown out with the trash. TerraCycle, a national mail-in recycling program, allows large organizations such as schools to collect and mail-in certain types of waste for points that can be redeemed to benefit non-profit organizations and schools. To learn more about candy wrapper recycling through TerraCycle, visit http://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/candy-wrapper-brigade-r.html.

While opening in a new country presents an opportunity for growth and revenue, it is also an opportunity to lose ours shirts — through unexpected issues and complications. As such, it is important for small businesses that don’t have gobs of cash to manage each opening carefully. That said, we now live in a world where opening abroad is much easier than it used to be. With Internet phone service, long-distance calls are cheaper than ever and flying to Australia from New York can cost little more than flying to Fayetteville, Ark. Most important, while there are certainly cultural differences among foreign markets, they are far less problematic than many presume. TerraCycle, for example, is basically operated the same way in every country where we have operations, from Brazil to Turkey. We do adjust for each location, but we try as much as possible to avoid making adjustments in order to maintain coherence in a small organization of just more than 110 employees. For TerraCycle, the first step in choosing a new market is to evaluate the legal, financial and language issues to make sure we have a good fit. The next step is to look at the market opportunity. Will our business model — in our case, recycling waste that has been considered nonrecyclable — work in that market, and is the market big enough to make the effort worthwhile? These issues are connected. Big markets — Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany — tend to have relatively simple legal and financial requirements, and they tend to use English as a primary (or, worst case, secondary) business language. This is not as true in Asian markets like Japan or South Korea, which are immense but handle business very differently (and not in English).

How many tubes of toothpaste do you think you've thrown in the trash after you've gotten that last squeeze? What about old toothbrushes? Once you're done with them there are ways to get them recycled. In fact, Terracycle will pay for you to send them in. From there, they are made into plastic pellets that can then be molded into everything from playground equipment to garden tools. Do Your Part and to get your trickiest of items recycled. It's actually a whole lot easier than you might have thought!

Be green and save some green on St. Patrick's Day at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. If you have an old cell phone, aluminum cans (1 lb. minimum), shoes and/or cooking and dining supplies you'd like to recycle, drop it off at the Zoo's box office on March 17, and you'll receive a $2 discount on Zoo admission. Volunteers will accept the above mentioned recyclable items from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. outside the Zoo's box office. These special offers are redeemable on March 17, 2013, only. Limit one discount per person. Proceeds from the aluminum can recycling will support the Zoo's Cans for Conservation program, which helps fund conservation projects here and abroad. The Cans for Conservation collection this year will benefit Slow Loris Conservation, The Little Fireface Project. Cell phones and cooking and dining supplies will be recycled through various organizations; and Terracycle will recycle paired shoes in good condition shoes (all types except sandals, slippers, skates).

Holt Elementary School is one of the only schools in the Eugene School District that participates in a program put on by Terra Cycle, a New Jersey based company that turns previously non-recyclable items such as chip bags, candy wrappers, juice pouches and yogurt containers into new products that range from park benches to backpacks to pencil cases, all thanks to Chastain. “I’ve been recycling for almost 40 years, because I feel that it is something I can do to help save the environment,” say Chastain. “It just seemed like a wise thing for me to do.” This program first caught Chastain’s eye in 2009 when she read a label on her son’s juice pouch box saying, “Earn money for your school.” After that, she started having the children in her son’s class collect juice pouches and she would then personally wash them and send them into Terra Cycle. Terra Cycle, which was started back 2001, has grown tremendously as a company and in 2012 it celebrated its 9th straight year of growing revenue.  The company recently expanded and created a system where schools can send in recycled items that can then be redeemed for points that benefit different charities that provide clean drinking water in Africa, meals to homeless Americans, or school supplies to homeless students.

There’s no longer any reason to throw out used, disposable pedicure flip-flops! They can be recycled with TerraCycle. Thanks to the sponsorship of Old Navy, spas can send their old flip-flops to TerraCycle free of charge—and receive exclusive coupons to share with clients in return for their recycling efforts. Employees and customers can simply drop the flip-flips in a designated box. When the box is full, an employee can download and print a prepaid UPS shipping label from the TerraCycle website and send the waste to TerraCycle. The flip-flops will be recycled into innovative products such as playgrounds, park benches and bike racks.

KLAS-TV Las Vegas highlighted the recycling efforts of Henderson International School. Recycling has been integrated into the curriculum to raise money for important causes such as hunger, poverty, and clean water.