Moms in need have babies in need. Research has shown that moms dealing with financial hardships often choose between buying diapers or other necessities like food. Some of these moms reuse soiled disposable diapers or leave a dirty diaper on their child longer than they should. You can help moms in need get access to clean diapers by recycling common household items for free with TerraCycle. Their newest charity partner is Huggies’ Every Little Bottom, an organization that provides free diapers and moms and babies that need them. In honor of all mothers this Mother’s Day, consider how you can help moms, babies, and the planet by signing up for one of the programs below.

Really looking forward to hearing Tom Szaky at FEI — he’s CEO and Founder, TERRACYCLE and author of Revolution in a Bottle. That’s him in the picture. You’ve got to love a guy who makes millions from garbage nobody else wants…that’s innovation!

You can help moms in need get access to clean diapers by recycling common household items for free with TerraCycle and their newest charity partner, Huggies’ Every Little Bottom, an organization that provides free diapers to moms and babies that need them. To help, sign up for one of these programs: Recycle Diaper PackagingHuggies and TerraCycle are now accepting shipments of any size of diaper and wipe packaging the Huggies Diaper Packaging Brigade. Parents can sign up to send in any brand of diaper packages and earn charity points. Recycle Cleaner PackagingMethod is expanding its program with TerraCycle to accept all kinds of cleaner packaging, regardless of type or brand. The newly dubbed Cleaner Packaging Brigade allows families, schools, or individuals to collect and recycle pumps, triggers, refill pouches and almost any cleaning product packaging to earn charity points. Recycle Baby Food Pouches - CONTEST This May, Sprout Foods is offering prizes to the three Sprout Foods Brigade participants that donate the most charity points to Every Little Bottom by May 31st! Moms can recycle baby food pouches to earn charity points and be entered to win a TerraCycle-Sprout Prize Pack, containing Sprout Organic Baby Food, Toddler Meals, Fresh Start cookbook by Sprout co-founder Tyler Florence and TerraCycle upcycled products.

After launching the Method Refill Brigade® in 2011, Method, the leading innovator in premium, environmentally-conscious household and personal care products, and upcycling/recycling pioneer TerraCycle, Inc. have now expanded the program to accept pumps, triggers, refill pouches and almost any cleaner product packaging, regardless of brand. Schools, offices, families or individuals can collect traditionally non-recyclable cleaner packaging and send it to TerraCycle to earn money for charity gifts and donations through the newly dubbed Cleaner Packaging Brigade. The collected packaging will be turned into trash cans, coolers and other home goods. “Packaging sustainability is a core priority built into the design of every Method product,” said Adam Lowry, Method co-founder and Chief Greenskeeper. “In addition to the recyclable packaging we make from recycled materials, we want every part of a cleaning bottle to be used again, including parts that aren’t accepted by most recycling systems, like triggers and pumps. Our goal with this Brigade is to ultimately collect more triggers and pumps than we actually manufacture, which would substantially improve the packaging footprint of not only Method, but our competitors as well.”

We invite you and your middle and high school students to join Philippe Cousteau and distinguished guest speakers for a special webinar to kick-off The Big CleanUP, an exciting summer-long contest involving young people taking action to protect our world’s oceans. The webinar and contest is a partnership between EarthEcho, TerraCycle, and One World One Ocean with a simple mission: remove plastic from the waste stream and earn money for your school. Prizes include a school visit from Philippe Cousteau and others, film passes, and more. During this webinar, we will also explore how plastic affects the oceans, how these issues relate to classroom learning, and how young people can take a lead in protecting our oceans. Students will hear from Philippe Cousteau as well as guest speakers from TerraCycle, a national recycling system for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste, and One World One Ocean, a multi-year campaign harnessing the power of film, television and new media to restore a healthy ocean.

After reaching key collection milestones in its cleanroom and laboratory garment recycling program's first six months, disposable garment distributor Kimberly-Clark Professionaland recycler TerraCycle are expanding their initiative to include a pilot program for gloves. Since the program's launch in October 2011, participating cleanrooms and laboratories have sent in more than 7,000 pounds of garment waste, including coveralls, hoods, boot covers, hair nets and masks, to be recycled into plastic products such as plastic lumber, park benches and picnic tables. Participating locations have requested more than 1,000 pallets of collection boxes to return additional garments, signifying that collections are on track to reach more than 350,000 pounds in coming months. Kimberly-Clark Professional and TerraCycle are actively pursuing additional locations for garment collection. "The launch of the program last fall was a tremendous success," said TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky. "The reaction to the program shows a need for recycling in this area, as well an industry desire to give a second life to garments and gloves. This new direction has been beneficial to TerraCycle, Kimberly-Clark Professional, laboratories and cleanrooms, and most importantly, the environment."

The Upcycled Tent Dopp Kit is made from all upcycled materials, except the zipper. It is light-weight and compact, and has the feel of a tent, since it is made from ‘the reclaimed fabric discarded in the manufacture of tents.’ The manufacturer of the bag, TerraCycle, is one of the United States leader’s in the concept of upcycling- taking useless or unused material and converting them into useful products. This little bag has a lot going for it. First, and most-important is it’s eco-friendly origins, coming from all upcycled materials, a cause almost everyone can get behind. The bags weight is a second strong feature- I have had tried many dopp kits in my travels, and this is by far the most lightweight. It is so lightweight, that I was concerned about it durability, so I decided to put it through some tests. I tried overloading it and dropping it to see if any of the seams or fabric would rip- and it passed with flying colors. I took it to the gym with me and allowed it to get comprehensively wet while I was showing, and true to it’s tent material, it held up nicely (better than many of the cheap tents I’ve bought!) It’s third very attractive feature is it’s capacity. When I pulled it out of the envelope, my first reaction was that there was no way this little bag would hold what i would need it to for an extended trip. In the process of my over-stuffing experiment, I was shocked at how much it actually took to fill the bag.

We had enough and we took our case straight to the top! All the way to the top, all the way to the Neal Supreme Court. Okay maybe it wasn't quite so drastic, but to my fantastic 4th graders we had some serious legal issues to debate and debate we did! Laura Candler from Corkboard Connections has a fun project titled Green Court Claims. Here is a summary of how we put this fun project to the test. To begin we discussed what we were all familiar with, recycling, although very few claimed they did it. The most common material that students recycled were soda cans. This led to the discussion of how there are many companies that are "going green", claiming that their products are environmentally safe. This intrigued them, and they set out on a classroom mission to find products with some type of claim. After a few short minutes they were finding all kinds of things claiming to be of recycled materials or environmentally safe. It was amazing how many items they found in a short amount of time. After our classroom scavenger hunt they were sent on their first mission. They were to go home and look for items in their own house that claimed to be "green". They came back with a wide variety of claims including tissues, cleaning products, plastic bags, and even dog food! TerraCycle Notebooks- these notebooks are made from recycled candy wrappers. It was the first time I had seen one, but I do have to admit they were fairly cool!

Cumming Elementary deserves congratulations for the amount of waste they are keeping out of the local landfill. The school is one of the top collectors of hard-to-recycle waste in TerraCycle's nationwide Brigade programs. The students collect Capri Sun drink pouches, Frito-Lay chip bags, cookie wrappers and Elmer's glue containers among several other items, which earns them money for charity and keeps the garbage out of the local landfill. Cumming Elementary has earned more than $2,620 from recycling items that would otherwise be thrown away, which translates to approximately 130,806 units of waste. TerraCycle turns the collected packaging into new products such as tote bags, recycling bins, watering cans and backpacks. The school is one of 90,000 schools and community groups across the globe collecting almost 50 different kinds of products and packaging that TerraCycle accepts. In addition to participating in the TerraCycle Brigades, Cumming Elementary also recycles cans and bottles through the Dream Machine Recycle Rally, a national program co-sponsored by PepsiCo that aims to raise awareness of the importance of recycling among K-12 students. Schools can earn rewards and compete for prizes. Interested parties in either the TerraCycle Brigade programs or the Dream Machine Recycle Rally can visit www.terracycle.com to sign up.

Honesty has been on my mind lately. My dashboard dictionary defines “honest” as “free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere”. For a company to use such an adjective in their name, they better mean it! I am not a big fan of juice boxes or pouches. The convenience is great for packing school lunches or traveling, but honestly, and we are being honest here, I want my kids to drink water. The other concern for me is disposing of the packaging. Honest Tea has partnered with Terracycle to solve this problem or at least alleviate it: Every year millions of drink pouches end up in garbage and landfills. Honest Kids and TerraCycle are working together to change that. As eco-friendly innovator, TerraCycle converts the drink pouches into unique fashion bags, tote bags, pencil cases, and other fun items for kids and adults. This a great idea, but you need to collect 500 pouches before you turn them in, and Terracycle will compensate $0.02 per pouch to your organization. That’s a lot of pouches! Honesty is an important value, perhaps the most important. It defines our personal integrity. As a marketing term, I don’t have a problem with it’s use by Honest Tea. The fact Coca-Cola owns part of the company makes it easy to find it in convenience stores and other places reaching a larger audience. There’s always balance when it comes to honesty. Disclosure: I was sent free samples of these products to review. No prior assurances were given as to whether the review would be positive or negative.