The packaging landscape has been “greened” the past years by consumer packaged goods companies (CPGCs) making sustainability improvements, initiative by initiative and packaged product by packaged product. These changes have been made for a number of reasons including meeting internal goals, meeting external expectations and/or cutting costs.
The packaging landscape has been “greened” the past years by consumer packaged goods companies (CPGCs) making sustainability improvements, initiative by initiative and packaged product by packaged product. These changes have been made for a number of reasons including meeting internal goals, meeting external expectations and/or cutting costs.
Sally’s brand cereal, the first Malt-O-Meal brand available in Canada and now moving into the U.S. in early 2012, starts off being green by its box-less, resealable bagged format. But the sustainability doesn’t stop there: Malt-O-Meal also purchases wind energy credits to offset 100% of the electricity used in the products’ manufacturing. And in partnership with TerraCycle® Canada (
www.terracycle.ca), an international upcycling company that takes packaging materials that can’t be recycled and repurposes that material into new, high quality goods, consumers can collect empty cereal bags and send them to TerraCycle for upcycling.
Broward College's TerraCycle is one of nation's best collection program. TerraCycle pays for material collected. Money from the program go towards the Michelle Lawless Scholarship Fund which supports female Environmental Science majors.
Last year the program collected more than 200,000 pieces. In 2012, the goal is 300,000. Trash to Treasure is a proud participant in the program. You can drop off your items at T2T during regular business hours.
Happy TerraCycle Tuesday! Today we're examining the Cereal Bag Brigade.
TerraCycle takes recycling to a whole new level with their recycling brigades program. The company was originally founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, a then 20 year old Princeton University Freshman. TerraCycle started by producing organic fertilizer (worm poop) in used soda bottles.
With even less coercing, Rutabaga was talked into yet another creative holiday craft! With slight patience, we created beautiful fancy bows out of non-recyclable chip bags and you can too!
Terracycle is a national recycling system for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste. Anyone can sign up for these programs, called the Brigades, and start sending Terracycle your waste. Since Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center is a zero waste facility, we do send Terracycle our non-recyclable items to lessen our impact on the environment even further. Presently, we are on the waiting list for the Chip Bag Brigade. As you can imagine, chip bags have been piling up at the center until we can send them off. In the meantime, we rinsed those bags out and put them to holiday use.
For today's post during this TerraCycle Refresher week on our blog, I'm sharing a list and description of what items we collect for TerraCycle here at Blue Ridge.
Glue Bottles/Sticks
Any size Elmer's brand glue sticks and plastic glue bottles are acceptable. Only Elmer's please!
We earn $0.02 per item.ri
A few weeks ago, we asked Bag The Box fans what they’d like to ask TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky in a no-holds-barred Q&A. “Trash-talk” ensued! Here are Tom’s answers to your trashy questions:
When I started TerraCycle ten years ago, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. On an entrepreneurial level, I did have some idea, but on an eco-level, it was not so. As I became more involved in upcycling and recycling, I learned more about trash than I ever realized I would! TerraCycle now processes trash from Logitech electronics to Mars candy wrappers and donates an incredible amount of money to charity every year thanks to our collection Brigade participants. Since we have lots of programs, and lots to recycle, people have lots of questions. The Malt-O-Meal and TerraCycle social networks teamed together to ask you all for your questions, and we did our best to choose some good ones.
Research Your Municipal Recycling
Just like checking the smoke detector batteries on the day the clocks change for daylight savings time, America Recycles Day is a great day to reacquaint yourself with your municipal recycling regulations. Most people can recycle glass, aluminum, paper, and certain plastics through curbside recycling, but the list of what is and is not accepted varies from town to town. What if you’ve been throwing #5 plastic in your recycling bin but it’s not accepted? What if your town, like my town, only accepts #1 and #2 plastic bottles of certain shapes? The neck must be smaller than the widest part of the bottle, so no tubs or odd-shaped containers are accepted. Who knew? I wouldn’t have unless I took the time to do a little research. Your town should have a list of accepted materials on its municipal website.
Recycle the Traditionally Non-Recyclable with TerraCycle
You recycled those “recyclables,” but what about the rest of your household waste?
TerraCycle is a recycling and upcycling company that specializes in traditionally non-recyclable and hard-to-recycle materials. You can send in hair care, skin care and cosmetic packaging, soap refill pouches, tortilla and tostada packaging, cereal bags and 40 other kinds of waste through the Brigade programs for free, thanks to sponsors like Garnier, Method, Mission Foods and Malt-O-Meal. For every piece of waste sent in to TerraCycle, the collector is awarded points, which can be put toward specific charity gifts or converted to cash and sent to any charity.
