At Longfellow Elementary School, recycling comes as second nature to the students, parents and staff who are part of four California schools that recently received the Green Ribbon Schools award by the United States Department of Education. Longfellow, at 3800 Olive Ave., was honored with the award along with Environmental Charter High School, in Lawndale; Grand View Elementary School, in Manhattan Beach; and The Athenian School, in Danville.

While choosing new designs with regard to bathrooms, a number of Us citizens are deciding to "go green" while they're just at it. Here are some interior design tips for achieving ones own environmentally-sound bathroom. First, go organic with your bath linens and bathe curtains. This one is an easy decision and does not cost much to undertake. Organic cotton requires less pesticides and it is usually softer than usual materials. Vinyl or plastic shower curtains can be hugely toxic, cautions Annie N. Bond, author of Property Enlightenment. As a substitute, choose a heavy silk cotton duck curtain, she adds. You can find a number of eco-friendly bath products with Gaiam. Then, choose organic bath products made without chemicals, like those with Aveda, to create a chemical-free zone. There are green cleaning products, like the "Greenworks Cleaner" or "TerraCycle Cleaner. "

One thing at the Earth Day assembly got me interested. The thing was Terracycle products. As shown in the assembly, regular things like folders and pencil cases are made out recycled items like juice pouches. I decided to check out their website, terracycle.net, and found a wide variety of stuff from scrapbooks to boom boxes. These things have a reasonable pricing and give a new twist to recycling! So what are you waiting for? Go to terracycle.net and see what you can get and do to help the environment! Go green!

As a social consumer, I knew I wanted to do something “good,” and when my career took a turn, I decided to go for it. The concept behind hipcycle is to make eco products affordable, durable and beautiful — create useful, new things from existing materials — items that would appeal to both the green and mainstream consumer. We recently teamed up with Terracycle to offer green cleaning products – in upcycled bottles. We’ve also partnered with Bright Endeavors, a Chicago-based program for new moms. And we are currently raising start-up money to start a new line of business where we will import fair trade products made in Cambodia from reclaimed plastic bags.

Garnier Fructis created their “Pure Line” of haircare products in collaboration with TerraCycle to help reduce personal care and beauty waste in landfills. Pure Clean Shampoo is 94% biodegradable and Pure Clean Conditioner is 92% biodegradable. These non-ecotoxic formulas, infused with acerola berry, do not leave behind heavy residues that can linger in the water and environment.

Yesterday, Sunday April 22 was the 42st Earth Day in the United States, but if you saw less promotional activity wrapped aroun the day it may be because Earth Day has 'jumped the shark." Albe Zakes, global VP of media retalions for TerraCycle, told Amy Westervelt at BusinessGreen.com that "With everyone and their mother doing some kind of quasi-green messaging around Earth Day, you risk a truly environmentally responsible promotion, product or service getting lumped into consumer's green fatigue and being consider green washing,"

While we're talking Earth Day, if you're reading this on Saturday, you might check out Moore College of Art & Design (20th Street and The Parkway) today between 11 am and 3 pm, where they'll be doing a presentation called MOOREcycle. It's an exercise "aimed at creating environmental awareness and encouraging camaraderie across all majors at Moore. Students have been working hard all semester upcycling ‘waste’ donated by TerraCycle into functional pieces for class assignments and a design competition held by Student Services. On April 21, Moore will showcase all class assignments and competition entries, and will also offer craft activities as a way to involve the rest of the community during the MOOREcycle event.

Finished a beauty product? We know—it’s a rarity in our world. We’ve only reached the elusive empty pan so many times in our lives, so it’s difficult to imagine the life cycle of a product after you’ve actually used it up! But an empty bottle isn’t an excuse to toss the remains in the trash, and a product junkie doesn’t have to forsake eco-responsibility in the name of beauty. In honor of Earth Day, let’s rethink the afterlife of used makeup merchandise.

RETURN IT

If you've got the urge to purge, some beauty brands will do the heavy lifting for you. MAC's famous Back 2 MAC program encourages recycling at the source. If you bring back six empty plastic containers to your local counter, they'll take the goods and gift you a lipstick of your choice! How's that for eco-incentive? For any other products, Garnier has teamed up with TerraCycle to responsibly dispose of makeup, skin care, and hair care bottles you don’t know what to do with. They send you a prepaid mailer, and you send them your stash!

HONEST TEA, like other organic beverage sellers, normally promotes its real leaves, fair trade certified tea, less sugary taste and environmentally friendly packaging. Its newest campaign acknowledges that it is part of a problem of waste in discarded drink containers and, to counter that, encourages more recycling. Enlarge This Image A rendering of a giant bin for Honest Tea's "Great Recycle" on April 30 in Times Square. The company alone generates about 20 million glass bottles and 60 million plastic bottles annually. Over all, Americans used 38.6 billion glass beverage containers, and 71.9 billion plastic beverage bottles in 2010, according to the Container Recycling Institute, an antiwaste organization based in Culver City, Calif., that tracks data on the topic.