In a contest called "Where Should Our Garden Grow?" Garnier and TerraCycle have asked for public participation to help choose the most deserving community organization to receive the next Green Garden, capable of yielding more than 2,000 lbs of vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers.

Makeup and beauty products might bring out your eyes or add some style to your hair, but the only addition to the environment is more packaging waste. And considering the top 100 personal care, beauty and cosmetic product companies sold an astonishing $195 billion worth of products in 2011.

This is the first year we have done anything like this.  Items will be sent to Terracycle, a recycling company that is collecting hair care, skin care and cosmetic product packaging for their free Personal Care and Beauty Brigade program.

Copper River Salons were already running a TerraCycle program to collect and recycle their personal care and beauty waste. At TerraCycle we provide free recycling programs (sponsored by various brands, like in this case Garnier) where we provide free shipping (via UPS) for your waste and will then reuse, upcycle or recycle the collected waste into something new.

Barbara Weigand, owner of the Copper River Salon on Moore Street, integrates her eco-conscious mindset into her business at every turn. They participate in TerraCycle’s Beauty Brigade, where up to 40 different types of beauty products can be collected and sent in, including shampoo and conditioner bottles, soap tubes and dispensers, foundation packaging, body wash containers and much more. She’s also put up nine collection bins around Princeton University so that students can easily participate

Join us today at the Housing Office at 2:00 p.m. as we learn about the Terracycle program and we create our fun drop off boxes!

Sometimes it’s hard to see the green through the greenwash. Goodebox cuts through the claptrap with a monthly service that delivers boxes of pre-screened beauty and personal-care samples to your doorstep. The burgeoning company not only vets each trial-sized product for sustainability, efficacy, and ethics, but it also tailors your selection to fit your age, skin profile, and personality. Past boxes, curated by green gurus like Renée Loux and Jess Blades, have included some of our favorite brands, including Dr. Hauschka, Tatcha, Josie Maran Cosmetics, and Kahina Giving Beauty. Plus, every dispatch is chockablock with exclusive discounts and special offers, as well as opportunities to win full-size products.

When our stuff is thrown away it ends up in a landfill. Now, that’s a really backward way to run a country and care for the planet. We are spending money to build lined and permitted landfills until the hole in the ground is full, and then we spend more on capping that landfill with an engineered and permitted design for that closing. And then we dig another big hole and proceed to fill that one, too. That’s our tax money. We worked to earn it and then, instead of saving it, we throw some away! Plympton does not have roadside trash pick-up. We have a transfer station. We take our trash there, where people are paid to oversee the crushing, sweeping up and seeing that it is picked up for hauling to a landfill. Trucks, truck drivers, gasoline, and all the administrative overhead costs that go with any business all go into hauling away our trash. Can you imagine how costly that is? Check out your town’s budget for that and think about it the next time you throw something away that could be taken out of that costly equation by recycling it. The trash bins would be open for receiving for a longer time, thus reducing the pick-up costs. Recycling would go up, bringing in money for the town. Halifax Town Hall has been collecting bottle caps for a few years now, all because of one little boy whose class was participating in a recycling program. The boy wanted to collect more than anyone else, and he did, with the help of a bunch of women collecting caps all year long. What began as a fun project to help one enthusiastic boy has become a routine practice. It would feel odd now to not remove the cap, thus lowering the value of the bottle, for they are made out of different plastics. Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. We need to pay more attention to the first two, and then, when we no longer can find a use for something, it’s nice to know that we have more options for recycling than what is offered by our town programs. It’s important to reduce our waste of money and our waste of the earth, too. “Terra” is Latin for “earth.” You can join in celebrating the care of our terra firma on April 22, this year’s Earth Day, by following the example set by the third-graders collecting paper and the little boy collecting bottle caps and Kevin helping Franklin Park Zoo via TerraCycle. Let the savings begin!

It’s time for spring cleaning, and the truth is in the trash. It’s springtime, alright. Down by the street there are bottles and packages tossed out of passing cars. I hate the looks of it, and I can’t understand how some people can do that without a bothered conscience. I am only thankful for a memory it elicits. When my children were young I discovered what looked like a bottle dump, except that these weren’t old and they were mostly “nip” bottles. My children confessed that I had stumbled upon their laboratory. They wanted to see what would grow in various mediums such as dirt, water or moss. My sister’s boy began to plead with jealousy that he wanted a lab, too! Don’t you just love children’s creative and sometimes competitive spirit? In a similar spirit, some people are making money by making creative recycling their business. One such company is TerraCycle based in Trenton, N.J. It was founded by the worm poop guy. You know of him, right? I remember the story being in the news but did not realize he has grown from homemade fertilizer to fantastic recycling partnerships all over the world. According to their website, “Founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old Princeton University freshman, TerraCycle began by producing organic fertilizer, packaging liquid worm poop in used soda bottles. Since then TerraCycle has grown into one of the fastest-growing green companies in the world.” TerraCylcing was recently brought to my attention by Kevin Rogers. Kevin works at the Franklin Park Zoo (among other cool places), where they receive some much-needed funds for collecting items usually considered trash. Candy bags, bread bags, cookie packages, cosmetic containers, tooth brushes, floss containers, pens and highlighters are among the items currently being collected. Kevin hopes to expand the benefits by finding locations allowing him to place collection boxes. He would also like to have some attractive containers built by partnering with the schools’ vocational classes. I suggested a Scout might be interested in the idea for an Eagle Scout project. For right now, the project has begun at the Halifax Recycling Center, with drop-offs of potato chip bags, cookie packages and candy bar wrappers. They ask that you please not place these items in your roadside pick-up, but take them to the Recycling Center.

Lester C. Noecker School, the Roseland Environmental Commission, the Roseland Green Team and Sustainable Roseland are collecting these and other personal care items in celebration of April as “Earth Month,” as well as Earth Day, which is Sunday, April 22. The school is participating in TerraCycle’s Personal Care and Beauty Brigade.  Each year millions of personal care products and beauty product packages are needlessly discarded and end up in landfills.  To divert them from landfills and to help create a second life for these items, each class will collect used personal care and beauty packages during the month of April.   A representative from the “Green Team” will pick up the items periodically and ship them directly to TerraCycle, where they will ultimately be recycled into fun and innovative products. The class that recycles the greatest number of items will win a certificate for each student and teacher to be used at the  Roseland Farmers’ Market, which opens in June and runs through November at the corner of Roseland and Harrison avenues.  The trip to the market will help teach students about accessing locally grown fresh food, and give them an opportunity to develop relationships with local growers and artisans who are raising awareness about the food system and promoting healthy eating habits.