A Pinecrest High School recycling club is striving to make Moore County a little greener. Aayushi Patel, a school senior and president of the Student Environmental Association, said her group has recently initiated a pair of projects that involve both her school and the international community. "Our biggest project at this time is the TerraCycle company's chip bag recycling competition, which is being held at Pinecrest for teachers and students to participate together to collect the highest amount of used chip bags," she said. "The TerraCycle company will then collect the bags for recycling." Patel said that 21 third-period classes will participate, with the winning class awarded a pizza party by Mellow Mushroom. Patel said the group collected 21,646 chip bags during the semester. "Our club mission is to spread awareness for recycling chip bags so that we have less trash occupying landfills," she said. "To include the Sandhills community into our recycling initiative, we have partnered with the Subway restaurants at Pinecrest Plaza and at Town and Country Shopping Center to put a recycling bin at their stores for Frito-Lay chip bags."

“It’s disgusting and wasteful, so I wanted to do something about it,” Stoner says. No, she’s not going to spend her off-duty time preaching about the evils of smoking and trying to get people to quit. Accepting that smoking will never be fully eradicated, she’d like to do something about all of those cigarette butts, which, contrary to popular belief, are not biodegradable. So Stoner, 33, is distributing metal coffee cans to willing restaurants and bars to fill with butts and other cigarette-related trash before sending it all off to New Jersey-based TerraCycle, which is internationally known for finding new uses for hard-to-recycle materials. Servers can now end their shifts by emptying ashtrays into her cans rather than into the trash. Already, The Hutch’s neighbor, American Dream Pizza, as well as The Lodge Bar & Grill near Southeast 66th Avenue and Powell Boulevard, and Patti’s Deli in Gresham have agreed to participate. TerraCycle will rework waste collected through the “cigarette brigade” into a variety of industrial products, such as plastic pallets, and the company will compost any remaining tobacco. Stoner heard about TerraCycle while collecting Capri Sun pouches to help raise funds for Woodmere Elementary School in Southeast Portland, where her son is in kindergarden. The key to her success in collecting juice pouches was enlisting the support of Capri Sun drinkers, and she expects smokers’ cooperation will be essential to her latest campaign. Servers might have time to empty ashtrays into cans, she says, but they’re not about to search gutters for extra butts.

TerraCycle is going to turn your trash into KME's cash! These are all the items we are collecting.

Earth Shepherd Environmental Group of Absegami High School conducted its first fundraiser over the fall, collecting over 100 flip-flops to be recycled, according to Earth Shepherd President Jamie Infanti.   The group teamed up with the Smithville and Reeds Road elementary schools in the collection effort. According to Infanti, the flip-flops will be recycled by TerraCycle Inc. into items such as trash bins, flooring and park benches.   TerraCycle is a national recycling group that specializes in recycling previously non-recyclable material or material that is hard to recycle. It was founded in 2001 by Pirnceton University freshman Tom Szaky.   “I saw a sign for the TerraCycle flip-flop recycling program at an Old Navy store and thought it would be a fun and different way to recycle and to encourage other people to do the same,” said Infanti, a 16-year-old sophomore at Absegami who started the Earth Shepherd group this year. “(The flip flop drive) seemed like something that would be easy for people to do and something that people would respond to.”

  Earth Shepherd Environmental Group of Absegami High School conducted its first fundraiser over the fall, collecting over 100 flip-flop to be recycled, according to Earth Shepherd President Jamie Infanti. The group teamed up with the Smithville and Reeds Road elementary schools in the collection effort. According to Infanti, the flip-flops will be recycled by TerraCycle Inc. into items such as trash bins, flooring and park benches.

The Earth Shepherd Environmental Group of Absegami High School recently conducted a successful flip-flop recycling program. Participating schools were Smithville Elementary and Reeds Road elementary schools and Absegami. The three schools collected more than 100 pairs of flip-flops over a two week period. The flip-flops will be recycled by TerraCycle Inc. They will be made into things such as trash bins, flooring and park benches. Earth Shepherd was just started at Absegami in 2012-2013 and this was its first recycling drive. The group has been involved in cleanups and other school activities. “We were impressed by how enthusiastic the two elementary schools were for helping us get started on one of our first major projects,” Earth Shepherd founder and President Jamie Infanti said. “Our hope is that these drives will help teach elementary school students the importance of recycling, and each year we will gain more and more momentum throughout."

TerraCycle is a social business, which means that we focus on the so-called triple bottom line: planet, people and profits. For us, this has meant creating a business model that involves capturing nonrecyclable waste — like chip bags or diaper packaging — before it goes to a landfill or incinerator and finding a way to recycle, upcycle or reuse it. Basically, we’re giving garbage a second life by creating a system for otherwise nonrecyclable waste to be recycled. Through sponsorship from more than 50 brand partners (L’Oréal, Kimberly-Clark) we are able to offer free shipping and a small donation (typically 2 cents per piece of waste received) to a school or organization of the collector’s choice. Today, we engage more than 35 million people in collecting this waste in 22 countries around the world. While our sales have grown every year for the past nine years — we finished 2012 with slightly less than $15 million in revenue — we just became profitable in 2011. We earned a small profit in 2012 as well. In my letter to the company, I wrote that our goal is to eliminate the very idea of waste: “This is a lofty goal that I believe is best executed via a for-profit platform. But I would like to underline that we do not exist for the sole purpose of profit.” Instead, I explained, profit is a tool we use to help us accomplish our purpose. But it can get complicated, and much depends on how a company is structured and financed. One challenge of trying to balance profits with a socially minded business can be the law. Perhaps the best example is the sale of Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield started the company in a renovated gas station in South Burlington, Vt. They were fair to their employees and their cows, they cared about the environment, and they used the business as a vehicle to raise awareness about social and environmental issues.

Our partners at Broward College are trying to collect over 300,000 TerraCycle pieces this year.  You can drop off items at Trash to Treasure or at Broward College Campuses. Here is the latest flyer.  Take a look because items do change:

Earlier this year, New Mexico-based Santa Fe Natural Co., a subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc., the nation's second-largest cigarette maker, and TerraCycle Inc. announced a partnership to recycle cigarette butts into pellets used to make such items as park benches, shipping pallets and railroad ties. The Cigarette Waste Brigade asks people to save and collect their butts, sending them to the recycling company through a prepaid shipping label. For every pound of cigarette waste sent to Trenton, N.J.-based TerraCycle, the sender will receive 100 TerraCycle points, which can be redeemed for a variety of charitable gifts, or for a payment of 1 cent per point to the charity of their choice, according to TerraCycle's website. The company plans to recycle the filters into pellets used to make a number of items, including ashtrays. The paper and tobacco also will be composted. It took nearly two years to develop the process to recycle the butts, made of paper, tobacco, ash and a filter from cellulose acetate, the company said. "This is one of the most exciting developments in TerraCycle's history," said Tom Szaky, TerraCycle's founder, in a statement when the program was launched. "As a company committed to recycling waste streams that others deem worthless or unsavory, cigarette waste will help to promote our belief that everything can and should be recycled." Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky is sponsoring the bill on the Senate side. "This should really be done at a higher level than the state level," DenDekker said about the recycling program. "But nobody in the federal government would even consider talking about a topic like this until some municipality somewhere institutes a pilot program that works, creates jobs and saves government money."

Cigarette waste can be found on most roadways and is very common in public places such as the beach or park. We have become immune to seeing cigarette butts on the ground and most people probably haven’t thought about recycling as an option for them. A new partnership with TerraCycle now makes recycling cigarette waste an option. TerraCycle collects discarded cigarettes that people mail to them through their Cigarette Waste Brigade and turns the filters into industrial products such as shipping pallets and plastic lumber. Some may question the safety of the products produced with recycled cigarette filters. There is no need to worry. To be on the safe side, TerraCycle never uses recycled cigarette filters in any consumer products that might come into contact with food or other consumables. All filters find their way into new industrial products. TerraCycle’s goal is to reduce the amount of cigarette waste we see every day. Recycling this material will make a significant impact when it comes to reducing waste. By creating new products, such as pallets, from cigarette filters reduces both the amount of waste in landfills and the quantity of virgin materials needed to make new products.