[gallery] [gallery link="file"]

TerraCycle Triathlon of Trash Winner Gets Free UGA Semester Dedicated to the Late Jim McGown of Athens who passed away March 7 of this year. A Veteran of the U.S. Navy, and a tireless worker for the betterment of mankind whose labor and efforts were felt as far away as the Middle East! There is No Waste...Only Wasted Resources! Perhaps Earth Day Should be Every Day as we only have one Earth and without it we would be lost! St Gregory the Great Episcopal Church on the East Side has now earned almost $6,000 by keeping over 260,000 pieces of formally difficult to recycle trash out of the landfill. While Broward College near Ft. Lauderdale has now earned $15,000. Let's be honest how much sense does it make to bury unbiodegradable trash under ground from land we stole from Mother Nature? This is Varsity Recycling: TerraCycle.com is now accepting what we would normally think of as difficult or impossible to recycle. Things like Any & All: Chip Bags, Candy Wrappers, Glue Sticks, Sunscreen  and Lipstick Tubes, and now Any and All Cigarette Trash to include Stinky Cigarette Butts. Here is the Deal: From right now until August 15th, 2013 collect everything you can from the list below placing and separating each category in its own container such as a  Box, Bird Seed, or Pet Food Bag.  Feel free to get as large as you want but make sure a single average person can move the container around fairly easy through average doorways with the assistance of a hand truck. Items can be damp but not soaked and should be shaken or squeezed free of most food and liquid.(No Need To Scrub or Rinse Anything Out) Boxes and Packages will be opened for inspection. The winner with the most by weight wins a free Semester(In-State Tuition estimated to be $3,800)! Participants will meet for a Showdown on August 16th, 2013 at a location To Be Determined. For more information meet Captain PLaneT for a personal demonstration, description, and Q&A in the Odum School of Ecology Courtyard on Tuesday June 11th, 2013 at 4:00 pm! Or schedule me for a briefing at your location! If you are far away I can just email you all the UPS Shipping Labels for free shipping and TerraCycle will do the measuring. Just ask me for a label for specific brigades. The List:

1. Any & All Drink Pouches(Such as Capri-Sun, Kool-Aid to include the straws and straw wrappers)
2. Any & All Coffee Pouches(Such as Maxwell House, Equal Exchange Organic, and Starbucks)
3. Any & All Cookie and Cracker Wrappers(Such as Oreo and Keebler)
4. Any & All Energy or Breakfast Bar and Energy Food Wrappers(Such as Granola Bars, Breakfast Bars, Cliff Bars, Oddwalla Bars, Nut Bags, Kashi Bars)
5. Any & All Candy Wrappers(Such as M&Ms, Hershey, and Snickers) and Gum Wrappers(Such as Trident, Bubblicious, and Wrigley)
6. Any & All Chip and Salty Snack Bags(Such as Frito Lay, Pepperidge Farm, potato chip, crackers, pretzel, cheeto, nacho, and any that look and feel similar)
7. Any & All Lunch Kit Trays, Wrappers(such as Lunchables)
8. Any & All Dairy Tub Containers(Such as Stonyfield Farms, Chobani, Dannon) Butter Type Spread Containers (Such as Country Crock, Promise, and yes even the little baby single serve sizes along with baby coffee creamers) Sour Cream and Cottage Cheese, etc.
9. Sprout Brand Baby Food as well as Any & All Crushed Fruit Bags and Containers and Wrappers(GoGo Squeeze, Plum Organics, Gerber,  Chiquita, Ella's Kitchen, etc)
10. Any & All Cereal Bags(Such as Malt-O-Meal, Rice Crispies, and Honey Nut Cheerios)
11. Bear Naked Brand Granola and Cereal Product Wrappers
12. Any & All Corks Real and Fake Plastic from wine and other liquor bottles
13. Any & All Disposable Household Tape Dispensers (Such as Scotch Tape)
14. Any & All Home Storage Bags and Containers (such as Zip Lock Type Bags, sandwich bags, and temporary tupperware plastic containers)
15. Any & All Paper Towel and similar Paper Product Wrappers (Such as Scotts Paper Towels, Tissue Paper, Paper Napkins etc)
16. Any & All Tooth Paste Tubes, Dental Floss Devices, and used Toothbrushes (Such as Colgate, Crest, etc)
17. Any & All Glue Containers and Glue Sticks (Such as Elmer's)
18. Any & All Human Writing Instruments except Chalk and Crayons (Such as Used Up or Broken Pens, Sharpies, Markers, Highlighters, Magic Markers, and Mechanical Pencils, Wooden Pencils)
19. Any & All Beauty and Skin Care Product Tubes and Containers (Such as Aveeno and Aveda Skin Product Tubes, Neosporin Medicine Containers, Lip Stick Tubes, Cosmetic Cases,  Chap Stick Tubes, Shampoo Bottles, Deodorant Sticks and Sun Screen Tubes and Bottles)
20. Any & All Diaper Wrappers (such as Huggies, Pampers, g-Diaper and any sort of Baby Sanitation Wipe as well as Incontinence Pad Wrappers)
21. Any & All Cell Phones, MP3 players, Digital Cameras,  GPS Systems, Calculators, Printer and Toner Cartridges, and Laptop Computers including all cords and chargers
22. Any & All Cheese Wrappers (such as Kraft, Kroger, Sargento)
23. Any & All Tortilla, Tostada & Bread Wrappers (such as Mission Tortillas)
24. Any and All Home Cleaning Containers and Items (such as Method Packs, Windex, Pledge, Ajax, and Toilet Brushes, Tubes, Pistol Squeezers)
25. Any and All #5 & #6 disposable plastic drinking cup (Solo Cups)
26. Any and All Laundry and Dish Wash Detergent Briquette Bags (Dropps, Tide, Cascade)
27. Any and All Wine Pouches
28. Any and All Hummus Products (like Athenos Hummus)
29. Any and All Shoes
30. Any and All Cigarette & Cigar Waste including all the ashes, unburnt tobacco, filter stubs, plastic outer wrap, aluminum paper inner wrap. (Please place in an airtight plastic bag inside the outer package)

Did you know you could be raking in the pennies while doing something that’s good for the environment:  recycling?   It all started when I bought five packages of Capri Suns at Kroger to fulfill part of a rebate I was working on. On the back of the package was information about Terracycle, a company that has kept over 1.2 billion pieces of trash out of landfills while fashioning super cool backpacks, pencil cases, tote bags, trash cans, even cork boards! Even more amazing to me was that they would donate $ .02 per pouch collected, to the school or charity of my choice!

Here at UC Davis we recycle bottles and cans, cardboard and Styrofoam, CDs and DVDs, fluorescent bulbs and sticky notes, toner and inkjet cartridges, batteries and electronics, and even wine corks. And paper, of course.   But what about our pens? Starting today (Sept. 14), we can recycle those, too, and other, selected writing implements — adding more “cool” to UC Davis’recent ranking as the nation’s “Coolest School” in Sierra magazine’s evaluation of sustainability in higher education.   Materiel Management, a longtime champion of campus sustainability efforts, is spearheading our newest recycling opportunity, by joining up with theTerraCycle Writing Instruments Brigade.   “Writing instruments?” Why not just call them “pens?”   Because TerraCycle Inc. takes any type of plastic-encased device: pens, mechanical pencils, markers and highlighters (the caps too!). And those correction tape dispensers that we sometimes use to erase what we wrote! But nothing encased in wood or metal. TerraCycle wants only the plastic for reuse in the company’s line of consumer products — storage bins, for example.

Imagine: Cigarette butts, whether on the street or in an ashtray, can now be turned into something useful. They could even help organizations do some modest fundraising. Yes, butt recycling has arrived in Canada, thanks to a program launched mid-May by an innovative company called TerraCycle Canada (terracycle.ca). What will those butts become? Skids or pallets made from the plastic filters, according to TerraCycle. The organic leftovers — the tobacco and paper — will be composted.

Imagine: Cigarette butts, whether on the street or in an ashtray, can now be turned into something useful. They could even help organizations do some modest fundraising. Yes, butt recycling has arrived in Canada, thanks to a program launched mid-May by an innovative company called TerraCycle Canada (terracycle.ca). What will those butts become? Skids or pallets made from the plastic filters, according to TerraCycle. The organic leftovers — the tobacco and paper — will be composted.

No one is quite sure who first discovered the cleaning method, but its effectiveness is indisputable: If one person uses a brush to swirl soapy water in the tray-cleaning bucket while another person plunges a dirty tray into the water, the tray will come out clean. The method is affectionately called “the swirly.” “The only days we can’t do it are nacho day and pasta day,” said Alexander Cohen, a fifth-grade Eco-Volunteer. Cleaning recyclable polystyrene trays at lunchtime is just one of the steps students, parent volunteers and staff at Bridge School have taken to promote recycling. What began as a parent-led initiative in which lunchtime recycling was done only on Fridays has evolved into a daily school-wide effort, with 90 student volunteers giving up recess time to help on a rotating basis.

11-04-29--blainespringlakeparklife-1

11-04-28--record-1