Fishburn elementary schools is among the five schools in Raonake that cooperate with a unique program offered by a New Jersey based company called TerraCycle.

Trenton, NJ––Ziploc® and TerraCycle, Inc. today announced the well-known food storage brand has become a sponsor of TerraCycle’s newest Brigade, and will provide fundraising opportunities exclusively for K-12 schools.

Terry Welington, Author of  The Mom's Guide to Growing Your Family Green, says,  “Neosporin has an initiative right now where you can recycle the empty or expired tube through a company called Terracycle that takes packaged goods and turns them into something better.  You go online and get a starter kit and you mail in the tube, they recycle it and donate the money to a charity or school in your community. So you benefit as well.”

Until recently, students at Jessie Mae Monroe Elementary School were unfamiliar with the idea of up-cycling. Up-cycling, as explained by Albe Zakes of TerraCycle, is “the process of taking non-recyclable material that can’t be traditionally recycled and find=ng a way to directly re-purpose it into a new product. By doing that, you̵'re giving it a new life cycle thus you’re up-cycling it.” Students at Jessie Mae Monroe Elementary are collecting, sorting, packing and sending drink pouches, chip bags, zipper style bags and Nabisco and Keebler cookie wrappers to TerraCycle. They will receive 2 cents per container for their efforts. Special needs teachers Emma-Lou Edwards and Lindy Hylton are coordinating the ongoing project.

Ziploc® and TerraCycle, Inc. today announce the well-known food storage brand has become a sponsor of TerraCycle's newest Brigade, and will provide fundraising opportunities exclusively for K-12 schools.  Through the Ziploc® Brigade, schools can collect bags an= containers of any size and send them free of charge to TerraCycle to be tur=ed into new plastic-based products.  For each bag or container collected, Ziploc® and TerraCycle will pay two cents to the school actually doing the collection.  Signups are beginning immediately at www.terracycle.net/brigades.

Mashpee -  For the students at Quashnet elementary school, it's easy being green . Every lunch period since August, the 520 third-through-sixth graders at the school have eschewed the trash can in favor of the recycling bin, collecting food wrappers in order to transform them in eco-friendly products through a partnership with  new Jersey based  comnpany Terracycle.

Plastic bag and container maker S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. has teamed with TerraCycle Inc. to increase recycling of its products. Racine, Wis.-based S.C. Johnson will sponsor the newest TerraCycle Brigade, which allows schools to collect Ziploc bags and containers and then send them back to the company. For each bag or container collected, Ziploc and TerraCycle will pay 2 cents to the school actually doing the collection.

The school signed up for the brigades, an upcycling program started by TerraCycle that is now in more than 50,000 schools nationwide. It's an easy thing to do," said Paul Stone, the school's adjustment counselor who found the program on the Internet. TerraCycle was founded in 2001 by then-19-year-old Princeton University student Tom Szaky, who gave empty drink pouches a second life by turning them into tote bags, backpacks, pencil cases, and lunchboxes.

Most impressive was the display from Middlebrook School, Wilton's middle school, where recycling is part of every student's day. As teacher Janet Nobles explained, every trash can in the school has an adjacent recycling bin for glass and plastic. Further, they are working with Terracycle to send them juice bags (like CapriSun) and snack bags that are then recycled into new consumer products. They are glad to receive donations of these from anyone. If you don't eat those particular products, note that they also recycle wine corks. A list is on the Terracycle web site

The school turned its trash into cash by sending various items to Terracycle, a recycling company. Through the program, the school has collected and saved more than 22,000 drink pouches, 200 tape dispensers and cores, more than 700 glue sticks, 4,000 chip bags, 350 lunch kits and more than 3,000 writing instruments from the landfill.