TerraCycle runs a program called the Personal Care and Beauty Brigade that collects plastic personal care product bottles. Since 2011, they have collected a total of 2.8 million pieces of beauty waste! When you think about the sheer number of different bottles and tubes you have in your bathroom cabinet … are you really that surprised?

Columbus Jewish Day School students this year have collected more than 3,000 beauty-product containers to recycle through a company named TerraCycle. The schoolwide recycling program began five years ago when fifth- and sixth-grade Judaic studies teacher Eva Tibor said she encouraged students to recycle their empty juice pouches. Tibor said the school expanded the program and began recycling energy-bar wrappers and containers for food and beauty products.

Butterfield Elementary School

Sanger school is a top collector of recyclables

Butterfield Elementary School is one of the top Texas collectors in TerraCycle’s Personal Care and Beauty Brigade recycling program.Students at the Sanger school collected hair care, skin care and cosmetic product packaging and assisted in diverting 7,200 units of waste from landfills, according to TerraCycle officials.

Occasionally, a theme emerges from the questions you so lovingly send me. Though you are separated by states and sometimes entire countries, somehow you are bound by common anxieties springing directly from the green zeitgeist.

I’ve always hated throwing away things that can be recycled. Then Sayward mentioned how Tom’s of Maine and TerraCycle are working together to recycle traditionally un-recycleable things. So I went to check it out. I found something even better. There are a bunch of ways that you can recycle through TerraCycle.

L’Oréal’s corporate sustainability commitment, Sharing Beauty with All, is focused on innovating, producing, living and developing sustainably.  One part of that program is Garnier’s Personal Care and Beauty Brigade. The brand formed a partnership with TerraCycle, a specialist in making consumer products from post-consumer materials. Last year, Garnier and TerraCycle transformed over 1,500 pounds of recycled personal care waste into a one-of-a-kind Garnier Green Garden in New York City.  This year, the program is going national in an effort to create gardens for deserving communities. Each Garnier Green Garden will be made from 100% completely recycled materials. According to Lauren Taylor, US director of public relations for TerraCycle, the unique challenge that Garnier’s program presented was developing a solution for the entire personal care and beauty product category’s waste stream, not just waste from Garnier-branded products. TerraCycle had to create a recycling process that was not only robust enough to handle all sorts of personal care and beauty product residue, but also versatile enough to accept the packaging from hundreds of different products—all while keeping it economically feasible for TerraCycle and Garnier. “Luckily, the ‘easy’ to recycle components of the program are indeed the most common,” she said. About 70% of the products collected in this waste stream are either #1 (PET) or #2 (PE, HDPE) plastic. This category contains primarily the personal care portion of the program—bottles and jars for shampoos, conditioners, lotions, body washes, and miscellaneous hair and skin products. It’s the beauty portion of the program that makes the program more difficult. This category contains either #5 (PP) plastics, or “other,” which includes cardboard/paper, #6 or #7 plastics, cosmetic residue, cosmetic brushes and applicators, and other miscellaneous cosmetic products. This portion is most difficult because it requires additional separation, cleaning and processing steps in the recycling process, which is why this category is not accepted by municipal recycling systems, according to Taylor. The Green Garden project isn’t Garnier’s sole answer to reducing packaging waste. It uses 30-50% PCR PET in all of its bottles. - See more at: http://www.happi.com/issues/2014-05-02/view_features/winning-packagingmore-or-less/#sthash.0tAb7CNG.dpuf

TerraCycle launched in Ruidoso in May 2013 when Coyote Howling started collecting for two Brigades: the Personal Care and Beauty Brigade and the Writing Instruments Brigade. Since then, Coyote Howling has twice received prizes in the Garnier Giveaway Sweepstakes for largest shipments in the Personal Care and Beauty Brigade in the Southwest region.

Rethinking what is trash is key to TerraCycling. TerraCycling is a concept that is less then 10 years old but has spread to more than 20 different countries and is now rooted and growing in the local Lincoln County community.

One dilemma with this process is knowing what to do with the “dispose” pile. A couple options to free your mind and hands of the undesired refuse are recycling all containers and seeing which beauty product manufacturers offer recycling programs that allow the public to return containers. Since many recycling programs only accept clean containers, an imperfect yet effective solution is to empty the leftover contents of the containers into a reused jar, seal with a lid and throw into the trash for landfill. This method at least prevents the cosmetics directly entering the water supply. Check out Terracycle’s free recycling program that allows anyone to download a prepaid shipping label and send the company boxfuls of used containers. In return, the sender receives points that can be redeemed for charitable gifts or for a monetary donation towards schools or non-profit organizations of his or her choice.

Morgan and her peers help to preserve the earth through the Fort Campbell, Ky., school’s new recycling program. Launched in September, Wassom has partnered with TerraCycle, an international upcycling and recycling company that collects difficult-to-recycle packaging and products and repurposes the material into affordable, innovative products, according to terracycle.com.