Anyone who packs a bagged lunch for a school-aged child knows that the Ziploc sandwich bag is for much more than just sandwiches. A regular packed lunch can have many, many Ziplocs, holding items such as sandwich, chips, carrot sticks, strawberries, and cookies. After lunch, all of these bags just end up in the trash. TerraCycle to the rescue!

Since most recycling facilities don’t currently accept flexible plastic (that’s the stuff they use in the wrappers), these concerned companies teamed up with the eco-innovators over at TerraCycle to do the next best thing: find a way to reuse the wrappers.

“I read about this TerraCycle program (in Reader’s Digest), which directly uses the items recycled. It looked like what we wanted to do, Hill said. “I was thinking it was just a small program, but then I saw it in a Better Homes and Gardens ad,” she said.

Fishburn elementary schools is among the five schools in Raonake that cooperate with a unique program offered by a New Jersey based company called TerraCycle.

Trenton, NJ––Ziploc® and TerraCycle, Inc. today announced the well-known food storage brand has become a sponsor of TerraCycle’s newest Brigade, and will provide fundraising opportunities exclusively for K-12 schools.

You’re probably wondering how in the heck recycling is going to support our troops. Bring in Terracycle. This company takes bottles, snack wrappers, toilet paper wrappers, Huggies packaging, etc and turns them into products.

,100 beauty, food, and home products were recently put to the test by Health Magazine to determine which are the “healthiest.” BEST HOME BUYS All-Purpose Cleaner: Seventh Generation Disinfecting Multi-Surface Cleaner ($2.99, SeventhGeneration.com) Bathroom Cleaner: Biokleen Lavender-Lime Bac-Out Bathroom Cleaner ($7.99, BiokleenHome.com) Glass Cleaner: Terracycle Natural Window Cleaner ($2.99, Terracycle.net)

Thankfully Terracycle and SC Johnson & Company (ZipLoc Bags) have devised a way to keep these bags out of our landfills, our forests, our streets, our oceans....... Every time you use a Ziploc® product - any type of bag or container - you can help save it from being discarded into a landfill by sending it to TerraCycle.

Along the way, Szaky (photo below) described how Terracycle had to negotiate with Pepsi and Coke for the rights to use their bottle shapes. He also talked about bottling, sleeving, and capping thousands of bottles of liquid garden fertilizer by hand before opening a factory in New Jersey; about getting sued by Scott’s, the garden product company, for trade dress infringement; and about how Terracycle and its unique upcycling concept of turning packaging waste into consumer products—bags, kites, pencil cases--is taking off around the world. “We’re establishing ourselves in a new country about every six weeks,” he told his Packaging Summit audience.

Terry Welington, Author of  The Mom's Guide to Growing Your Family Green, says,  “Neosporin has an initiative right now where you can recycle the empty or expired tube through a company called Terracycle that takes packaged goods and turns them into something better.  You go online and get a starter kit and you mail in the tube, they recycle it and donate the money to a charity or school in your community. So you benefit as well.”