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Trick-or-Trash, Escanaba students collect candy wrappers to recycle
Rubicon Global Launches “Trick or Trash” Halloween Campaign to Keep Candy Wrappers Out of Landfills
Rubicon Global announced that the company has launched a Halloween campaign designed to help elementary and middle-school teachers across the United States educate their students on the importance of recycling and keeping candy wrappers out of landfills. The campaign is in keeping with the company’s B Corp mission to end waste.
According to industry data, $2.6 billion will be spent on candy in 2019(1), and Americans purchase nearly 600 million pounds of candy(2) for Halloween.
Throughout the month of October, Rubicon will be running its first ever “Trick or Trash” campaign, offering teachers in elementary and middle schools across the United States a recycling and circular economy lesson plan, as well as a Candy and Snack Wrappers Zero Waste Box through TerraCycle for students to discard their Halloween candy wrappers within. All of these items are being provided free of charge(3).
“We believe this campaign can be a catalyst for the next generation to recycle more and reduce waste in our world,” said Nate Morris, Founder and CEO of Rubicon. “Our hope is this program is a great addition to everyone’s Halloween festivities while providing teachers with a curriculum with which to educate students on how to develop positive recycling habits.”
“TerraCycle’s mission has always been to ‘Eliminate the Idea of Waste’ and we’ve proven that solutions do exist for items that may seem difficult to recycle,” said Tom Szaky, Founder and CEO of TerraCycle. “Rubicon not only shares our commitment but has taken it to the next level by spearheading the ‘Trick or Trash’ Halloween campaign to reduce the impact of candy and snack wrappers on the environment and help pave the way for a greener future.”
Rubicon Global is a technology company that powers a digital marketplace, provides a suite of SaaS products for waste, recycling, and smart city solutions, and collects and analyzes data for businesses and governments worldwide. Using technology to help turn businesses into more sustainable enterprises and neighborhoods into greener and smarter places to live and work, Rubicon’s mission is to end waste in all of its forms by helping its partners find economic value in their waste streams and confidently execute on their sustainability goals. The company is a Certified B Corporation, affirming that Rubicon meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance and aligns its business with purpose and social good. Through its technology, Rubicon is transforming the entire category of waste and recycling.
Teachers can download the lesson plan immediately upon sign-up. After completing the sign-up, a Candy and Snack Wrappers Zero Waste Box will be shipped to their school. Once delivered, teachers can simply set up the box in their classroom, cafeteria, or hallway, and encourage the students to deposit all of their candy wrappers in the box. Once the box is full, teachers can simply close the box, attached the prepaid shipping label, and ship it off free of charge.
Rubicon Global Launches “Trick or Trash” Halloween Campaign to Keep Candy Wrappers Out of Landfills
Rubicon Global announced that the company has launched a Halloween campaign designed to help elementary and middle-school teachers across the United States educate their students on the importance of recycling and keeping candy wrappers out of landfills. The campaign is in keeping with the company’s B Corp mission to end waste.
According to industry data, $2.6 billion will be spent on candy in 2019(1), and Americans purchase nearly 600 million pounds of candy(2) for Halloween.
Throughout the month of October, Rubicon will be running its first ever “Trick or Trash” campaign, offering teachers in elementary and middle schools across the United States a recycling and circular economy lesson plan, as well as a Candy and Snack Wrappers Zero Waste Box through TerraCycle for students to discard their Halloween candy wrappers within. All of these items are being provided free of charge(3).
“We believe this campaign can be a catalyst for the next generation to recycle more and reduce waste in our world,” said Nate Morris, Founder and CEO of Rubicon. “Our hope is this program is a great addition to everyone’s Halloween festivities while providing teachers with a curriculum with which to educate students on how to develop positive recycling habits.”
“TerraCycle’s mission has always been to ‘Eliminate the Idea of Waste’ and we’ve proven that solutions do exist for items that may seem difficult to recycle,” said Tom Szaky, Founder and CEO of TerraCycle. “Rubicon not only shares our commitment but has taken it to the next level by spearheading the ‘Trick or Trash’ Halloween campaign to reduce the impact of candy and snack wrappers on the environment and help pave the way for a greener future.”
Rubicon Global is a technology company that powers a digital marketplace, provides a suite of SaaS products for waste, recycling, and smart city solutions, and collects and analyzes data for businesses and governments worldwide. Using technology to help turn businesses into more sustainable enterprises and neighborhoods into greener and smarter places to live and work, Rubicon’s mission is to end waste in all of its forms by helping its partners find economic value in their waste streams and confidently execute on their sustainability goals. The company is a Certified B Corporation, affirming that Rubicon meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance and aligns its business with purpose and social good. Through its technology, Rubicon is transforming the entire category of waste and recycling.
Teachers can download the lesson plan immediately upon sign-up. After completing the sign-up, a Candy and Snack Wrappers Zero Waste Box will be shipped to their school. Once delivered, teachers can simply set up the box in their classroom, cafeteria, or hallway, and encourage the students to deposit all of their candy wrappers in the box. Once the box is full, teachers can simply close the box, attached the prepaid shipping label, and ship it off free of charge.
Rubicon Global's "Trick or Trash" Halloween Recycling Campaign Reaches More Than 450 Schools in 49 States
For more information, visit www.rubiconglobal.com.
We Should Recycle Those Halloween Candy Wrappers - Gemini Middle School Is
Is It Time To Ban Halloween Candy?
We need to talk about Halloween candy.
Public awareness of our plastic pollution crisis is at a high, plastic straws and bags are getting banned in cities and states across the country, and yet there has been almost no discussion about the massive environmental problem that Halloween candy creates.
Americans will buy approximately 600 million pounds of Halloween candy this year, spending $2.6 billion on bite-sized candy bars and bags of candy corn. After the holiday, nearly all the wrappers and packages from these confections will end up in landfills, where they’ll sit around for decades or more.
Candy wrappers are very hard to recycle. Like most food wrappers and packages, candy wrappers are not meant to be mixed with bottles and cans and sent to a sorting facility. “They are too small for our equipment to sort,” said John Hambrose, communications manager at Waste Management Inc., one of the largest sanitation companies in the U.S. Most curbside recycling programs prioritize capturing rigid plastics like bottles, jugs and materials that are at least the size of a credit card.
And it’s not just size that’s a problem. It’s what candy wrappers are made from.
“There are so many varieties of candy out there and equally abundant are the types of wrappers,” Jeremy Walters, sustainability manager for Republic Services, another major waste disposal company, told HuffPost in an email. “Though some wrappers feel like paper, they often have a ‘waxy’ or ‘poly-coating,’ leaving it unfit to be mixed with paper for recycling.”
Recycling systems aren’t designed to capture and sort wrappers “because they have little dollar value,” said Nick McCulloch, senior manager of sustainability at Rubicon Global, a waste reduction tech company.
“Recycling is in part about economics — the value of the raw materials you’re collecting needs to exceed the cost of collecting them. Candy wrappers make that math hard because they’re made from low-value plastics,” he told HuffPost. “You’d have to collect tens of thousands of wrappers to help make those economics work.”
Nevertheless, a few small efforts exist to curb the waste associated with hard-to-recycle materials like candy wrappers.
In September, HuffPost reported on the launch of the first municipal program in the country that encourages residents to throw flexible plastics, including candy wrappers, in the recycling bin. Eight thousand households in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, are participating so far, and nearby communities will join the experiment by the end of the year. The area uses a recycling facility with the advanced technology to deal with flexible plastics. Most facilities around the country would need millions of dollars to upgrade their equipment.
This month, recycling company TerraCycle launched its first “Trick or Trash” program for Halloween candy wrappers. Initially, school teachers and students could request a free recycling box before the holiday; and once the box was full, they’d return it to TerraCycle, which cleans and breaks down the wrappers to be made into new items. But due to overwhelming demand in more than 40 states, the company had to stop sending out free boxes. Schools can still purchase a recycling box for snack and candy wrappers, but they’ll have to pay TerraCycle $81 to cover the costs associated with recycling these items.
Some food manufacturers have begun to experiment with wrappers made from recyclable materials. In the U.K., Nestlé recently launched its first recyclable paper packaging for a snack bar. The company did not respond when HuffPost asked whether it planned to use this new packaging on other products.
Walters told HuffPost that he worries about this so-called recyclable paper packaging.
“In theory it is a step in the right direction, but ultimately the biggest issue with this packaging is going to be contamination,” Walters wrote. “If you love chocolate as much as I do, you probably have experienced the Earth-shattering disappointment of opening up your chocolate bar and realizing it melted in your bag over the course of the day. Think about the sticky, chocolatey mess inside that wrapper. If that new ‘recyclable’ type of wrapper is soiled with chocolate or other food materials it cannot be mixed with paper grades coming out of the modern-day recycling center.”
So what’s an environmentally conscious trick-or-treater to do?
In the zero-waste Facebook group of which I’m a member, I asked if folks had alternatives to Halloween candy wrapper hell. Several members said they went out of their way to hand out plastic-free treats ― like playing cards made from paper, compostable chewing gum from a plastic-free store, or classic Halloween favorites that come in paper containers (like Nerds, Lemonheads and Milkduds).
“If we all make it a point to support companies and brands who are really tackling the problem of disposability and taking steps to find solutions, we can force meaningful change,” said Sue Kauffman, North American public relations manager of TerraCycle.
Waste Management’s Hambrose agreed, saying that people can make a difference “by purchasing products that use less packaging and recycled materials,” and by sharing their concerns with elected officials.
Individual actions won’t get us very far so long as companies keep churning out candy in single-use packaging, according to Greenpeace representative Perry Wheeler. “It’s time to rethink how we are delivering these products while still making it enjoyable for children,” Wheeler said.
“It is overwhelming to enter the Halloween aisle this time of year and think about where all of this plastic will end up — polluting our oceans, waterways, or communities,” he added. “The cost of inaction on our throwaway culture is just too high to ignore.”
One member of the Facebook group said this is not an issue their household bothers to tackle, despite working toward a waste-free lifestyle. “I have no solutions,” they wrote. “We just deal the best we can.” They added that they try to limit the number of houses they visit to collect less candy in the first place.
Another option is extreme action, like banning all unrecyclable food packaging, not just candy wrappers. Such an effort, however, would not only be unpopular, and therefore unlikely to gain political traction; it’d be tough to enact and enforce.
Bans on plastic straws and shopping bags are highly controversial, and there isn’t a consensus yet on how effective they are. Research published earlier this year found that California’s ban on plastic shopping bags might be driving up sales of plastic garbage bags. And bans on plastic straws have proved difficult to implement.
When we asked Hambrose whether a gigantic trash-hauler and recycler like Waste Management would favor a potential ban on candy wrappers, he was aghast.
“Waste Management would never get between a trick-or-treater and a candy bar,” Hambrose said. “We can’t think of anything more horrifying.”
If it matters to you, it matters to us. Support HuffPost’s journalism here. For more content and to be part of the “This New World” community, follow our Facebook page.
HuffPost’s “This New World” series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
Niles, IL Participates in Rubicon's "Trick or Trash" Campaign
Trick Or Treat And Learn About Recycling, From TerraCycle and Rubicon Global
Is It Time To Ban Halloween Candy?
We need to talk about Halloween candy.
Public awareness of our plastic pollution crisis is at a high, plastic straws and bags are getting banned in cities and states across the country, and yet there has been almost no discussion about the massive environmental problem that Halloween candy creates.
Americans will buy approximately 600 million pounds of Halloween candy this year, spending $2.6 billion on bite-sized candy bars and bags of candy corn. After the holiday, nearly all the wrappers and packages from these confections will end up in landfills, where they’ll sit around for decades or more.
Candy wrappers are very hard to recycle. Like most food wrappers and packages, candy wrappers are not meant to be mixed with bottles and cans and sent to a sorting facility. “They are too small for our equipment to sort,” said John Hambrose, communications manager at Waste Management Inc., one of the largest sanitation companies in the U.S. Most curbside recycling programs prioritize capturing rigid plastics like bottles, jugs and materials that are at least the size of a credit card.
And it’s not just size that’s a problem. It’s what candy wrappers are made from.
“There are so many varieties of candy out there and equally abundant are the types of wrappers,” Jeremy Walters, sustainability manager for Republic Services, another major waste disposal company, told HuffPost in an email. “Though some wrappers feel like paper, they often have a ‘waxy’ or ‘poly-coating,’ leaving it unfit to be mixed with paper for recycling.”
Recycling systems aren’t designed to capture and sort wrappers “because they have little dollar value,” said Nick McCulloch, senior manager of sustainability at Rubicon Global, a waste reduction tech company.
“Recycling is in part about economics — the value of the raw materials you’re collecting needs to exceed the cost of collecting them. Candy wrappers make that math hard because they’re made from low-value plastics,” he told HuffPost. “You’d have to collect tens of thousands of wrappers to help make those economics work.”
Nevertheless, a few small efforts exist to curb the waste associated with hard-to-recycle materials like candy wrappers.
In September, HuffPost reported on the launch of the first municipal program in the country that encourages residents to throw flexible plastics, including candy wrappers, in the recycling bin. Eight thousand households in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, are participating so far, and nearby communities will join the experiment by the end of the year. The area uses a recycling facility with the advanced technology to deal with flexible plastics. Most facilities around the country would need millions of dollars to upgrade their equipment.
This month, recycling company TerraCycle and tech company Rubicon Global partnered to launched a “Trick or Trash” program for Halloween candy wrappers. Initially, school teachers and students could request a free recycling box before the holiday; and once the box was full, they’d return it to TerraCycle, which cleans and breaks down the wrappers to be made into new items. But due to overwhelming demand in more than 40 states, the companies had to stop sending out free boxes. Schools can still purchase a recycling box for snack and candy wrappers, but they’ll have to pay TerraCycle $81 to cover the costs associated with recycling these items.
Some food manufacturers have begun to experiment with wrappers made from recyclable materials. In the U.K., Nestlé recently launched its first recyclable paper packaging for a snack bar. The company did not respond when HuffPost asked whether it planned to use this new packaging on other products.
Walters told HuffPost that he worries about this so-called recyclable paper packaging.
“In theory it is a step in the right direction, but ultimately the biggest issue with this packaging is going to be contamination,” Walters wrote. “If you love chocolate as much as I do, you probably have experienced the Earth-shattering disappointment of opening up your chocolate bar and realizing it melted in your bag over the course of the day. Think about the sticky, chocolatey mess inside that wrapper. If that new ‘recyclable’ type of wrapper is soiled with chocolate or other food materials it cannot be mixed with paper grades coming out of the modern-day recycling center.”
So what’s an environmentally conscious trick-or-treater to do?
In the zero-waste Facebook group of which I’m a member, I asked if folks had alternatives to Halloween candy wrapper hell. Several members said they went out of their way to hand out plastic-free treats ― like playing cards made from paper, compostable chewing gum from a plastic-free store, or classic Halloween favorites that come in paper containers (like Nerds, Lemonheads and Milkduds).
“If we all make it a point to support companies and brands who are really tackling the problem of disposability and taking steps to find solutions, we can force meaningful change,” said Sue Kauffman, North American public relations manager of TerraCycle.
Waste Management’s Hambrose agreed, saying that people can make a difference “by purchasing products that use less packaging and recycled materials,” and by sharing their concerns with elected officials.
Individual actions won’t get us very far so long as companies keep churning out candy in single-use packaging, according to Greenpeace representative Perry Wheeler. “It’s time to rethink how we are delivering these products while still making it enjoyable for children,” Wheeler said.
“It is overwhelming to enter the Halloween aisle this time of year and think about where all of this plastic will end up — polluting our oceans, waterways, or communities,” he added. “The cost of inaction on our throwaway culture is just too high to ignore.”
One member of the Facebook group said this is not an issue their household bothers to tackle, despite working toward a waste-free lifestyle. “I have no solutions,” they wrote. “We just deal the best we can.” They added that they try to limit the number of houses they visit to collect less candy in the first place.
Another option is extreme action, like banning all unrecyclable food packaging, not just candy wrappers. Such an effort, however, would not only be unpopular, and therefore unlikely to gain political traction; it’d be tough to enact and enforce.
Bans on plastic straws and shopping bags are highly controversial, and there isn’t a consensus yet on how effective they are. Research published earlier this year found that California’s ban on plastic shopping bags might be driving up sales of plastic garbage bags. And bans on plastic straws have proved difficult to implement.
When we asked Hambrose whether a gigantic trash-hauler and recycler like Waste Management would favor a potential ban on candy wrappers, he was aghast.
“Waste Management would never get between a trick-or-treater and a candy bar,” Hambrose said. “We can’t think of anything more horrifying.”
If it matters to you, it matters to us. Support HuffPost’s journalism here. For more content and to be part of the “This New World” community, follow our Facebook page.
HuffPost’s “This New World” series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com