One Bexley classroom has jumped into action, based on the November Board of Education approval of a district partnership with AmeriCorps. The AmeriCorps program addresses critical needs in communities across America, offering “75,000 opportunities for adults of all ages and backgrounds to serve through a network of partnerships with local and national nonprofit groups,” according to americorps.gov.

"Our TerraCycle Campaign Takes on a New Challenge" We have decided to revamp our TerraCycle campaign as a new year's resolution. We will no longer be collecting Huggies diaper packaging, but old beauty containers instead. Starting in January, our TerraCycle collection will have a new drive and image!

Finding an environmental message in the lyrics of a hip hop song can be tough. Students at Rock Creek Elementary, however, had the opportunity to experience just that during lunch on Dec. 7 when the Green Team put on a performance of the “Compost Rap” in the cafeteria to teach their classmates about the school’s composting program. The performance is a part of the school’s strategy to become a King County-certified Level 2 green school.

Two ambitious young Princeton students, Tom Szasky and Jon Beyer, founded Terracycle in 2001. Their main idea in founding the company was to do something productive using waste products. They used worms to turn garbage into useful items like fertilizer. This is a process known as upcycling. Some of the products produced by Terracycle include fertilizer, all-purpose cleaner, recycled fence, picture frames, and cactus plant food. Rubbermaid and Oxo Good Grips are two U.S. plastic companies that have purchased plastics from TerraCycle. Old Navy and Office Depot each had promotions sponsored by Terracycle for Earth Day. Terracycle also had a program called Bottle Brigade that was used for fundraising for schools.

TerraCycle, one of the world's foremost collectors of non-recycling  waste, has found success with its engagement  strategies, said Albe Zakes, global VP of media. Of the organization's  30,000 Facebook fans, over 75% are monthly active users, and over 60%  are weekly active users—numbers that are earned through engagement. TerraCycle's low-cost social marketing is centered on contests,  giveaways, promotions and cross-promo opportunities. And while the costs around developing a Facebook game are huge, Zakes said that TerraCycle found a small social gaming start-up that aligned with the organization's  socially responsible views and partnered with them to make a Facebook  game based on the TerraCycle recycling model. They got 100,000 users in  the first six weeks, which increased site traffic by 21% and boosted  e-commerce, making Facebook a revenue source, and not a cost.

In 2008, one Upper Blue Elementary fourth-grader figured out how to divert juice pouches from the landfill and turn them into useful and innovative creations like bags and purses. Now, Samantha Buer's project continues, and it's not only pulling waste from the landfill, it's raising money to provide clean water for three people for one year, meals for hungry Americans, carbon credits to reduce carbon from the atmosphere, adoptions of 37 acres of wildfire land, and chicks for needy families. They also donated money to the Red Cross, Oxfam America, Save the Children, Doctors without Borders and AmeriCares. Buer's “Juice Pouch Brigade,” created through TerraCycle, creates an avenue through which Upper Blue's Kids in Action students have collected more than 7,225 juice bags from Capri Sun, Honest Kids, Kool Aid and other brands since 2008. Terracyle is an organization whose goal is to eliminate waste by creating collection and solution systems for anything that gets sent to the landfill.

‘Red Solo Cup, I fill you up. Let’s have a party, let’s have a party!’ Toby Keith has a popular song about the benefits of Solo Cups, but he fails to cover what happens to them when the night is over. Freshman Sparkman Clark of GreenUR has presented the University of Richmond with a solution for these unrecyclable quantities.

Schools render lots of rubbish that’s thoughtlessly disposed when it could very well be recycled. An exceptional recycling system known as TerraCycle has brought about a major change in the recycling methods of schools in the US. This method takes the step to recover food packaging products which are hard to recycle and also pays schools for their hard work. As stated in a MichigansThumb.com report, this program awards points to schools according to the volume of recyclable goods transported to TerraCycle. The creation of single-serve foods has multiplied the amount of disposable waste and contributed to a rising pile of dangerous waste material in landfills.

As far as holidays go, Christmas is by far the most wasteful. Each year, Americans throw away hundreds of thousands of tons of gift wrapping alone. That doesn’t include plastic and cardboard packaging or even the toys that get played with for a couple of weeks and then forgotten. The frenzy to buy, buy, buy gets more intense each year as people struggle to fill lists that get longer and longer. The result is a huge amount of waste.

TerraCycle helps people recycle those hard-to-recycle items like chip bags, toothpaste holders, yogurt containers and more. It is TerraCycle’s goal to eliminate waste completely. More than 20 million people in 14 different countries have taken part in TerraCycle’s recycling programs, called “Brigades.” Each Brigade is a program that collects a certain waste and recycles it. It is FREE to send your waste in to many of the Brigades.