TerraCycle is included in Entrepreneur Magazine's Top 100 Most Brilliant Companies To Watch

It seems not a day goes by when you hear about school budgets being radically cut, or even closed, and as a result the educational future of our next generation in uncertainty, lacking in depth & breadth. Theater, music, even the always preserved sports are being left to the side, in favor of focusing on how to train good test takers, to better secure funding. Where in this is environmental education? In most cases, non existent. This is a problem—How can we expect the children of today to be capable stewards of our troubled planet when they don't have the basic knowledge of what's going on, what their role is, and what they can do? That's why I'm really proud to have launched the free TerraCycle Curriculum, with a lot of help from the preeminent sustainability education designer Cloud Institute. What is it? Well let me start with what it's not: Another rehashing of the basics of, let's face it, how to be a "better consumer." Don't get me wrong, of course I'm in support of more people making greener purchase choices, recycling, using CFLs, etc. But that's being covered everywhere you look these days, in all manner of media.

As part of a new collaboration, a handful of residents is turning trash into cash. It's an effort to go green while getting green. One of the first programs Gilbert teamed up with in town is Upcycle It! created by fellow resident Kristina Greene. The initiative collects non-recyclable items such as chip bags, candy-bar wrappers, coffee bags and juice pouches in a number of drop-off bins around town. The bins are collected weekly and then sent to Terracycle, an international company that takes the "trash" and makes it into a number of products. Skittles wrappers become an insulated cooler tote bag. Crushed computers and fax machines are morphed into flower pots. Circuit boards are reused as clipboards and drink coasters. Oreo Cookie packaging is transformed into a kite and much more. The innovative "recycling" is not the only benefit to Westford. Each piece of trash that's collected and sent in is worth anywhere from two cents for chip bags to 25 cents for cell phones. All the money Greene collects from Upcycle It! is then donated back to Westford schools.

  Two years ago, a seventh-grader at Carolina Friends School figured out a way to make a difference. After reading a book on global warming, Davi Nydick-Cheshire decided the time had come to do something.   "Up until then I knew that global warming was bad, but I thought it was something I had no control over," she says. "The book taught me about all the little things my family and I could do to reduce our carbon footprint."   Davi emailed Mig Little-Hayes, a teacher at Carolina Friends School, about starting an environmental club at school. A good number of students became interested in her idea that school year. After holding a naming contest, the group officially became the Eco-Chicos, with Mig, the teacher, in charge. The group meets during lunch break once a week to plan environmentally related activities, such as recycling fairs and other events.   Our biggest ongoing project is the selling of reusable grocery bags. They're made from 100 percent recycled materials and are manufactured by the Elizabeth Haub Foundation. They are sturdy, low-cost bags, and they've been quite popular at school. The Elizabeth Haub Foundation helps to develop environmental laws and legislation worldwide. The main reason we sell these bags is to get people to stop using plastic and paper bags from stores. The Eco-Chicos have raised over $1,000 by selling them and hope to buy something big to make the middle school greener. Another project is "Trash-Free Tuesday." We turn all of the trashcans in the middle school upside down and put one trashcan out for people to use. We weigh the trash the day before and at the end of the day on Trash-Free Tuesday. People are encouraged to bring their lunches in reusable containers, and to recycle and compost.   We also collect items that often end up in landfills, such as stackable yogurt cups, juice pouches, cookie wrappers and cell phones, and send them to a company called TerraCycle. It recycles these items, making them into tote bags, backpacks, lunch boxes, folders and other creative products. The yogurt cups are turned into flower pots. TerraCycle sends us collection bags or boxes for sending the items back in, and even pays for the shipping. In return, the Eco-Chicos make a small profit.

Amanda Owens has turned trash into a high school credit. Amanda, 15, spent her sophomore year at Smith-Cotton High School running a recycling program as a class. Amanda said she was looking for a class to fill her fifth block when she heard about the opportunity to implement and manage the program. “I had to write a proposal to the administration first,” she said. Once administrators approved the proposal, it was sent to the school board, where it also was authorized. Then the real work started. Amanda needed large outside bins and several smaller containers to place inside the school before the program could even be initiated on campus. So, she wrote more letters, sent e-mails and made phone calls. The teenager’s tenacity paid off when the city of Sedalia agreed to place large recycling containers behind the school. And Sutherlands donated four large plastic trash cans with hinged lids. “When I got (the bins), I was excited,” Amanda said. “That’s what we needed to get started.” With the help of Mona McCormack, the Smith-Cotton teacher who served as the advisor for the recycling program, Amanda placed two bins in the teacher’s work rooms. She then sent another mass e-mail to teachers and staff members at the high school informing them of the placement of the bins and what materials would be accepted. “I collected newspapers, magazines and white paper,” Amanda said. With the paper collection sites set, Amanda expanded her operation to the lunch room, where she asked the cafeteria staff to place the large tin cans in the recycling bins instead of the trash can. Amanda said staff members embraced the program and immediately began filling the bins with empty cans. But Amanda didn’t stop there. Through word-of-mouth and a presentation played during lunch periods, Amanda also began asking students to drop off candy, chip and Capri sun juice bags in McCormack’s room. McCormack said the bags will be sold to a company called TerraCycle for 2 cents apiece. TerraCycle creates a variety of products with the bags including purses, coolers and pencil bags. The money earned will be put back into the recycling program. Amanda said the program, which is in its first year, has been a success and she is looking forward to expanding it during the upcoming school year.

MARQUETTE - The fourth- and fifth-graders in JoeyLynn Selling's class at North Star Elementary are turning snack time into a schoolwide recycling project. The kids have spent much of the school year collecting hundreds of chip bags, candy wrappers and juice pouches that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill and sending them off to be recycled into everything from backpacks to lunch boxes to notebook covers. The "trash" is boxed up and shipped to a project called TerraCycle, which uses the packaging to make tote bags, pencil cases and other items. "They have purses and handbags and backpacks," student Alli Goriesky said. "It's a lot of fun." The program accepts packaging from Frito Lay, Mars Snackfood and Kashi products. The products are then sold at retailers around the country, including the classroom store at North Star and at www.terracycle.net. "This is basically a big class project," Selling said. "Somebody's assigned to recyclables. We call it 'lunch patrol.'" Kids in the class split up responsibilities including collecting the wrappers and packaging from the entire school during lunch, washing out the juice packages and sorting them.  Even when out on field trips the kids have been known to pick up litter to put toward their project."Everybody knows now," said student Elena McCombie, explaining that other classes in the school have begun forwarding their trash to the collection.  "We'll put the box at basketball games," Goriesky said.In addition to being able to have the recycled products in their store, the class also gets two cents per item collected.  The project allows the class to send in about a pound of wrappers and juice pouches at a time, and encourages participants to also use recycled shipping materials."It's trash and it gives them a responsibility in the classroom," Selling said.

TerraCycle proves the saying that, “Someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure” by upcycling consumer waste into useful, new products. The company’s most recent effort is a vegetable growing kit for kids, made from used Stonyfield yogurt cups and filled with TerraCycle’s famous Worm Poop (plant food made from biological waste). The cups come from Terracycle’s Stonyfield Yogurt Brigade, a collection program that pays schools and non-profits for every used cup they collect. The paperboard tray that holds the cups together is infused with the seeds needed to start the plants. When kids are finished with the kits, they can send the cups back to TerraCycle to be reused again.

James River High School students collect drink pouches to raise funds for the Exceptional Education class.

If you're anything like me, mountain biking makes you hungry. Hungry enough to warrant taking food on the trail. And what satisfies your hunger? Well, if we're still drawing similarities to myself...typically an energy bar, trail mix or handful of granola will do the trick. Why are we talking about my trail snack consumption? Because I just found out about this recycling program that will keep my wrappers out of the landfill. Dubbed the TerraCycle "Brigades," this free collection program converts hard to recycle wrappers into unique products like shower curtains or backpacks. "As an eco-friendly start up company, many of our employees are outdoor enthusiasts themselves," TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky, an avid biker, said in a press release. "They were sick and tired of seeing wrappers on the trails they were running and biking on!"  So, how does it work? Request to join the Energy Bar Brigade and TerraCycle will ship four postage-paid collection bags to your address. When you fill a bag with 200 wrappers, seal it up and send it off at a UPS drop-off location. Oh, and for every wrapper you collect, two cents will be donated to a school or charity of your choice!

You’ve heard it over the years: Company creates curriculum for schools, with conflicted teachers not wanting to advertise to their students, but at the same time at a deficit in terms or resources. Frequently, this is a justifiable concern, as companies have advertising and product placement throughout. This is a mistake. No matter the short term value, the lingering long term effect is this mixed feeling towards the brand, and diluted educational offerings to students. Of all the things that I’ve done as CEO of Terracycle, none has excited me more than what we’re about to launch: The TerraCycle Curriculum Series. There is minimal branding in the curriculum. No mention of our products. No focus on how to be a good consumer. Instead, we teamed up with sustainable curriculum specialist Cloud Institute and created an academically rigorous nine part program to be released over three years each spring, fall and winter that’s built to be fit within national curriculum standards. Free. We are committed to this being more than happy talk for kindergartners, that’s long forgotten by first grade. There are four distinct programs covering from K to 12, ranging from “Where do apples go? A story about the nature of Materials” to “An exploration of Cradle to Cradle design thinking” So, you may be asking, why do this?