This year, bringing green into the fall and winter is easy. While packing lunches for kids as they head back to school, options for staying eco-friendly and keeping lunch tasty are at your fingertips. TerraCycle, a pioneering recycling and upcycling company, offers eco-friendly, upcycled and recycled lunchboxes as well as a way to earn money by collecting non-recyclable food packaging such as cookies, chips, and juice pouches.
As it says on the game's official Facebook page :
In a distant, but not so unrealistic future, where people have abandoned your town because it has become covered with trash, you the player, have been left to clean up the mess; So grab this trash picker, invite your friends and start to clean up your trash-strewn town to become the Willy Wonka of the garbage business.
Describing the game as the "Willy Wonka of the garbage business" might be going a bit far, because the game's style isn't imbued with anything mysterious or eccentric. But the company that sponsored the game, TerraCycle , is known for "upcycling " and making products out of weird things. Namely, these include used food wrappers from things like M&M's and Oreo cookies. In the Facebook game, players collect trash and occasionally find treasures, profit from fertilizer generated from their own worm farms, clean up ramshackle houses and will have the opportunity to do some in-game upcycling of their own. As the game says, "It's Eco-Capitalism!"
To help, one company is offering consumers a way to reduce their household garbage while earning money for local schools or charities. Through free collection programs called Brigades, upcycling pioneer TerraCycle is collecting and paying for packaging waste from household staples -- from the bathroom to the kitchen to the classroom.
Many major brands are getting on board with upcycling. Scott tissues and Huggies are sponsoring programs to collect plastic packaging waste from paper products and diapers. And since most oral hygiene products aren't recyclable, Colgate and TerraCycle have partnered to collect used toothbrushes and toothpaste cubes.
