CEO of TerraCycle, Tom Szaky, built an eco-friendly powerhouse before green was popular. In TerraCycle's own words, "It all started in 2001 as a simple organic fertilizer company. Two college students fed the leftovers from their cafeteria to an army of worms. They harvested the worm compost and liquefied it into a completely organic, ultra-effective fertilizer. Not having any money they could not buy the packaging they needed to start selling their fertilizer. Undiscouraged, they began to bottle their liquid fertilizer in used soda bottles they collected from people’s recycling bins, unwittingly creating the world’s first product made from and packaged entirely in waste!

TerraCycle is a company known for eco-innovation. They take trash and upcycle it into great, green goods like backpacks, notebooks, folders, tote bags, wallets and pencil cases along with yard and garden products. Now they are creating a line of eco-gadgets under the Eco-Nation sub brand. "Eco-nation is staying ahead of the fashion curve with a conscience: big impact on your gadgets, small impact on the planet." These new green gadgets will help you "groove greener". The TerraCycle Eco-Nation gadgets start out as candy wrappers from M&Ms, Skittles, Starburst and other candies and get transformed or "upcycled" into awesome speakers and boomboxes. These handy upcycled speakers come as flat, folded cardboard that you fold into a boombox or set of speakers and attach to your iPod  or other mp3 player. The speakers and boombox run off the mp3 power supply so they need no batteries.

The Friends of Van Cortlandt Park is collecting non-recyclable items as part of a promotion to reduce waste and to raise money for various programs. Items being collected are: candy wrapper packaging from Mars/Wrigley or Cadbury; empty drink pouches from Honest Kids, Capri Sun and Kool-Aid; and empty Elmer’s glue bottles and sticks. For each item sent in, the Friends receive 2 cents. Those interested in volunteering should contact the group for further instructions at 718-601-1460, or go to www.vancortlandt.org. The program is done in conjunction with Terracycle, an eco-friendly group that “upcycles” the collected materials into new, ecofriendly and affordable products. For more information, go to http://www.terracycle.net.

As the grand marshal of Sunday’s Strawberry Festival parade, Rita Materni may be waving, but she won’t be chucking candy at crowds. But if she did, she’d probably shout out, “Recycle that wrapper!” She’s joined two “brigades” through www.terracycle.net, collecting used cookie wrappers and juice pouches and getting paid 2 cents for each. These items are turned into unique accessories and other products, according to TerraCycle, which says that over 10 million people worldwide have collected 1.8 trillion units and earned over $1 million for charity.

MARQUETTE - The fourth- and fifth-graders in JoeyLynn Selling's class at North Star Elementary are turning snack time into a schoolwide recycling project. The kids have spent much of the school year collecting hundreds of chip bags, candy wrappers and juice pouches that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill and sending them off to be recycled into everything from backpacks to lunch boxes to notebook covers. The "trash" is boxed up and shipped to a project called TerraCycle, which uses the packaging to make tote bags, pencil cases and other items. "They have purses and handbags and backpacks," student Alli Goriesky said. "It's a lot of fun." The program accepts packaging from Frito Lay, Mars Snackfood and Kashi products. The products are then sold at retailers around the country, including the classroom store at North Star and at www.terracycle.net. "This is basically a big class project," Selling said. "Somebody's assigned to recyclables. We call it 'lunch patrol.'" Kids in the class split up responsibilities including collecting the wrappers and packaging from the entire school during lunch, washing out the juice packages and sorting them.  Even when out on field trips the kids have been known to pick up litter to put toward their project."Everybody knows now," said student Elena McCombie, explaining that other classes in the school have begun forwarding their trash to the collection.  "We'll put the box at basketball games," Goriesky said.In addition to being able to have the recycled products in their store, the class also gets two cents per item collected.  The project allows the class to send in about a pound of wrappers and juice pouches at a time, and encourages participants to also use recycled shipping materials."It's trash and it gives them a responsibility in the classroom," Selling said.

A whole bunch of brand new TerraCycle items will be available, during April for a limited time only, at every single Walmart across the country. Starting April 5th, nearly 60 TerraCycle products will be sold right next to the original items they were made from. Cheetos kites and tote bags made from Frito-Lay wrappers will be sold with bags of Frito-Lay chips, while notebooks and purses made out of skittles and M&M wrappers will be sold right next to bags of Mars Candy!

A recent podcast by the Pat Kenny show on RTE outlined a number of recycling and upcycling ideas including flavour of the month, Terracycle. TerraCycle makes affordable, eco-friendly products from a wide range of different non-recyclable waste materials. With over 50 products available at major retailers like Walmart, Target, The Home Depot, and Whole Foods Market, TerraCycle is one of the fastest growing eco-friendly manufacturers in the world.

Fashionable?  Well, maybe not to my taste.  Smart marketing?  I think so.  TerraCycle (http://www.terracycle.net/) is a company that collects food wrappers and containers and upcycles them into other products ranging from pet clean up products to school supplies. The program is somewhat similar to some of your favorite loyalty programs; Yoplait's "Save Lids to Save Lives,"  General Mills "Box Tops for Education" or Campbell's soup wrapper program.  Like those programs, groups, such as schools, can collect wrappers or containers and get ~.02-.03 per unit as a donation.  The wrappers and containers must be from specific sponsoring brands/products such as Frito Lay, Mars Candies and Kimberly Clark.  The sponsoring companies get "green"  halo from partnering with a green company, build consumer loyalty since TerraCycle only collects waste from specific products and then get major retailers like Home Depot and Walmart selling book bags, folders, Christmas bows, etc made from their packaging.

From their classrooms to store shelves, Fort Myers schools are learning how waste can be reused instead of discarded. With hundreds of students eating lunch everyday, the teachers at several area schools - St. Michael Lutheran, Orangewood Elementary and Colonial Elementary - used to see a lot of used drink pouches get thrown away.

Egads, almost three years ago now, I wrote about a New Jersey company (woo-hoo, go Jersey!) called Terracycle that uses discarded stuff of all sorts — discarded technology accessories, empty juice packs and so on — to create stuff like flower pots and tote bags (like the ones pictured below).