If you read their story – it all boils down to the fact that this is a company that takes recycled fruit juice pouches and turns them into backpacks, cooler bags and lawn fertilizer. People are literally walking around with bags of old fruit juice packets on their backs. They take all this recycled stuff, break it down, stitch it together and make a nice little product – all at pretty reasonable prices.

CEO of TerraCycle, Tom Szaky, built an eco-friendly powerhouse before green was popular. In TerraCycle's own words, "It all started in 2001 as a simple organic fertilizer company. Two college students fed the leftovers from their cafeteria to an army of worms. They harvested the worm compost and liquefied it into a completely organic, ultra-effective fertilizer. Not having any money they could not buy the packaging they needed to start selling their fertilizer. Undiscouraged, they began to bottle their liquid fertilizer in used soda bottles they collected from people’s recycling bins, unwittingly creating the world’s first product made from and packaged entirely in waste!

TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net>  is the world’s leader in the collection and reuse of non-recyclable post-consumer waste. TerraCycle works with over thirty major brands in the US (and in a growing number of other countries) to collect used packaging and products (chip bags, candy wrappers, juice pouches, pens, toothbrushes, etc.) that would otherwise be destined for landfills. Minneapolis-based Malt-O-Meal Company, the largest family owned cereal manufacturer in the country, today announced a new partnership with TerraCycle, an upstart up-cycling company that takes packaging materials and turns them into affordable, high quality goods. The partnership will create 1,250 Malt-O-Meal Cereal Bag Brigades in elementary and secondary schools across the country. Malt-O-Meal Cereal Bag Brigades will function as collection sites for post-use Malt-O-Meal cereal bags and help prevent a significant amount of packaging waste from going into landfills. Individuals or school groups can sign up to sponsor a Brigade, with proceeds to benefit a designated school, school-sponsored club, or school-sponsored special interest group. There is no cost to start a Brigade, and all shipping costs are paid. For every Malt-O-Meal cereal bag collected and upcycled through TerraCycle, the designated school will receive a $.02 donation from TerraCycle.

The kids collect everything from candy wrappers to water bottles and send them off to be turned into products for you, and money for their school. "They're keeping all this from going into landfills," said Cindy Kelley, of the Delta Parent Teacher Organization. "We found potato chip bags and drink pouches," said Ashgen Dozier, a student. "Then we send it off and they turn it into purses and stuff." "Other fund raisers, the kids have to go and sell items and with this they already have the items," said Kelley. "This way they just have to take it to the school." Kelley says she found out about the program from the back of a juice box.  She checked it out and discovered all the kids had to do was collect trash either by picking up litter or looking into trash bins, or saving their waste. "We took a little teasing because we look in trash cans," said Kelley. "But we use gloves and do it safely." "We've raised $801," said Grant Coomer, a Delta Elementary student. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_f-ti5KUWw

WOOLWICH TWP. Fifty first-grade students at the Gov. Charles Stratton School demonstrated what they've learned about recycling and composting this year in "Composting - The Musical." They sang songs on Thursday about what can be recycled, what can be composted and what kids can do themselves to help keep the landfills empty. "This year the first-graders got a chance to see first hand how they can make a difference," Joann Ellis, one of the school's teachers, said. The children have been taking part in a recycling program with Trenton-based Terracycle. The company makes eco-friendly items from materials that would normally be non-recyclable. Students at the school have been sending their trash to Terracycle for the last five months including 607 cookie wrappers, 9,025 drink pouches, 2,984 chip bags, 263 Elmer glue sticks and 24 Scotch tape rolls. For each item they donate Terracycle gives the school two cents, which gets donated to charity.

Why is WalMart selling trash? Because it is coming repurposed from TerraCycle Inc. I’m sure you have seen some of their stuff. TerraCycle sells backpacks, kites and coolers made from reused drink pouches, chip bags and candy wrappers. Their products are actually really cool looking. I see them everywhere. My son’s school even collects Capri Sun pouches for them. However, so far, the venture has lost money. The items they use are otherwise tough to recycle trash. Thankfully for TerraCycle (and the landfills), WalMart agreed to sell dozens of the products in connection with Earth Day during April. If enough of the items sold during the trial period, the company would land a huge deal with WalMart. If I had realized that, I would’ve picked up a couple of their things. I saw them, but really wasn’t in the market for them in April.

TerraCycle Inc. aims to make money by reusing the hard-to-recycle trash the U.S. produces each year — but it first needs to find out if Walmart Stores Inc. and other retailers think there's enough demand for its products.    The company, which sells backpacks, kites and insulated coolers made from reused candy wrappers, drink pouches and potato-chip bags that normally would have gone to landfills, has so far been a money-losing proposition. But Walmart, the world's largest retailer, agreed to sell dozens of TerraCycle products in about 3,400 stores in a promotion tied to Earth Day during the month of April.   If TerraCycle sold enough to land an extended deal with Walmart or another big retailer, the Trenton, New Jersey, company could turn its first profit this year. "The pressure is as high as I can think of," says founder Tom Szaky.

TerraCycle is a company known for eco-innovation. They take trash and upcycle it into great, green goods like backpacks, notebooks, folders, tote bags, wallets and pencil cases along with yard and garden products. Now they are creating a line of eco-gadgets under the Eco-Nation sub brand. "Eco-nation is staying ahead of the fashion curve with a conscience: big impact on your gadgets, small impact on the planet." These new green gadgets will help you "groove greener". The TerraCycle Eco-Nation gadgets start out as candy wrappers from M&Ms, Skittles, Starburst and other candies and get transformed or "upcycled" into awesome speakers and boomboxes. These handy upcycled speakers come as flat, folded cardboard that you fold into a boombox or set of speakers and attach to your iPod  or other mp3 player. The speakers and boombox run off the mp3 power supply so they need no batteries.

With faculty making creative use of interoffice mail to band together for the environment, the staff at Scripps Research Institute is collecting their old wine corks to raise money for The Nature Conservancy. The organization gets 2 cents for each cork that the institute collects and returns to a company called TerraCycle, which makes affordable, eco-friendly products from packaging waste.

In 2001, enterprising 19-year-old Princeton student Tom Szaky started TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net/>  to turn out containers of organic fertilizer produced by worms for an entry in the school's business plan competition. He used old soda bottles to sell the fertilizer, and cleared $1 million in 2006. Over the next few years, Szaky expanded the company to produce goods made from upcycled, non-recyclable materials: totes made from plastic shopping bags, kites made from cookie packages, and laptop cases made from drink pouches (among others). You can even send TerraCycle your own trash and they'll turn it into part of their product line.