A company called Terracycle, featured last year on National Geographic's series Garbage Moguls, recycles pens, candy wrappers, tooth brushes, and even that supposed scourge of the waste bin: dirty diapers. The materials are remade as park benches. Any young athlete has already noticed the recycled tires in her playground mulch, turf cushioning, and track-and-field surfacing; but tires also appear in cosmetics and in the shock absorbers that now grace many highway guard rails. Even wax-coated cardboard, long considered a contaminated recyclable, can be repurposed as a fireplace wood substitute.

In 2009 a parent volunteer at St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Glen Burnie saw an advertisement for a company called TerraCycle. Its “Get cash for trash” headline caught her attention, and before you could say, ‘Sounds too good to be true,’ there was a bin in the school cafeteria for the students to deposit their empty juice pouches at lunch. Since then, the school has collected over 70,000 juice pouches and recycles an average of 1,000 pouches per week during the school year. Founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, TerraCycle began upcycling various products around 2007. An initiative that started with drink pouches, today the company offers more than 40 Brigades® that collect what was previously non-recyclable or difficult-to- recycle waste. A brigade is simply the term TerraCycle uses to designate its donations—so there is, for example, the Yogurt Container Brigade, the Cheese Packaging Brigade, and the Candy Wrapper Brigade. St. Paul’s initally joined the Drink Pouch Brigade. Most of the brigades are free for participants and include free shipping as well as a donation for each piece of waste recycled.

Honest Tea, an organic beverage company, made headlines when it launched an app to recycle Facebook posts last week and set up a 30-foot-tall inflatable recycling bin in New York City's Times Square on Monday. It's all part of a campaign the 14-year-old company, bought by Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO) last year, calls "The Great Recycle." The company's goal is to recycle every bottle it produces by 2020. That's a worthy target, especially considering that Honest Tea generates approximately 20 million glass bottles and 60 million plastic bottles annually. It has a long way to go before it's as sustainable as it can be. If I could change one thing about the company, it would be to reduce its use of plastic bottles and single serve juice containers. Studies have shown that plastic bottles leach, and plastic is made of petroleum products, which is not a renewable source. Worse yet is single-use products, which can't be reused.

The saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. For TerraCycle, an upcycling and recycling company in Trenton, N.J., trash from schools in Knoxville and surrounding areas has become its treasure. Items that are traditionally non-recyclable — such as Frito-Lay chip bags, Capri Sun drink pouches, MOM Brands cereal bags and Colgate oral care products — are collected to make products sold in stores such as Target. The company recycles — or upcycles — trash into backpacks, tote bags, pencil cases, notebooks, messenger bags, and binders as well as watering cans and plant caddies.