JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A program to recycle energy bar wrappers is ending in a Wyoming town known for outdoor sports and elsewhere.
After four years, a recycling center in Jackson will stop taking Clif Bar wrappers.
Clif Bar offered the recycling since 2008 through a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specializing in hard-to-recycle materials.
The company collected the wrappers to be melted down into hard plastic. It donated a penny per wrapper to the American Releaf Program, which plants trees in areas affected by wildfires, mining, development and other disruption.
The program raised about $500,000 from wrappers collected at 14,500 locations, according to its website.
The program required recycling workers in Jackson to sort through and throw out everything that wasn't a foil-lined energy bar wrapper, the Jackson Hole News & Guide reports.
The center needed to collect 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of wrappers before shipping them.
Clif Bar pledges on its website to create packaging that’s 100% “reusable, recyclable, or compostable” by 2025. The company did not respond to News & Guide requests for comment.
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A program to recycle energy bar wrappers is ending in a Wyoming town known for outdoor sports and elsewhere.
After four years, a recycling center in Jackson will stop taking Clif Bar wrappers.
Clif Bar offered the recycling since 2008 through a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specializing in hard-to-recycle materials.
The company collected the wrappers to be melted down into hard plastic. It donated a penny per wrapper to the American Releaf Program, which plants trees in areas affected by wildfires, mining, development and other disruption.
The program raised about $500,000 from wrappers collected at 14,500 locations, according to its website.
The program required recycling workers in Jackson to sort through and throw out everything that wasn't a foil-lined energy bar wrapper, the Jackson Hole News & Guide reports.
The center needed to collect 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of wrappers before shipping them.
Clif Bar pledges on its website to create packaging that’s 100% “reusable, recyclable, or compostable” by 2025. The company did not respond to News & Guide requests for comment.
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A program to recycle energy bar wrappers is ending in a Wyoming town known for outdoor sports and elsewhere.
After four years, a recycling center in Jackson will stop taking Clif Bar wrappers.
Clif Bar offered the recycling since 2008 through a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specializing in hard-to-recycle materials.
The company collected the wrappers to be melted down into hard plastic. It donated a penny per wrapper to the American Releaf Program, which plants trees in areas affected by wildfires, mining, development and other disruption.
The program raised about $500,000 from wrappers collected at 14,500 locations, according to its website.
The program required recycling workers in Jackson to sort through and throw out everything that wasn't a foil-lined energy bar wrapper, the Jackson Hole News & Guide reports.
The center needed to collect 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of wrappers before shipping them.
Clif Bar pledges on its website to create packaging that’s 100% “reusable, recyclable, or compostable” by 2025. The company did not respond to News & Guide requests for comment.
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A program to recycle energy bar wrappers is ending in a Wyoming town known for outdoor sports and elsewhere.
After four years, a recycling center in Jackson will stop taking Clif Bar wrappers.
Clif Bar offered the recycling since 2008 through a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specializing in hard-to-recycle materials.
The company collected the wrappers to be melted down into hard plastic. It donated a penny per wrapper to the American Releaf Program, which plants trees in areas affected by wildfires, mining, development and other disruption.
The program raised about $500,000 from wrappers collected at 14,500 locations, according to its website.
The program required recycling workers in Jackson to sort through and throw out everything that wasn't a foil-lined energy bar wrapper, the Jackson Hole News & Guide reports.
The center needed to collect 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of wrappers before shipping them.
Clif Bar pledges on its website to create packaging that’s 100% “reusable, recyclable, or compostable” by 2025. The company did not respond to News & Guide requests for comment.
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A program to recycle energy bar wrappers is ending in a Wyoming town known for outdoor sports and elsewhere.
After four years, a recycling center in Jackson will stop taking Clif Bar wrappers.
Clif Bar offered the recycling since 2008 through a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specializing in hard-to-recycle materials.
The company collected the wrappers to be melted down into hard plastic. It donated a penny per wrapper to the American Releaf Program, which plants trees in areas affected by wildfires, mining, development and other disruption.
The program raised about $500,000 from wrappers collected at 14,500 locations, according to its website.
The program required recycling workers in Jackson to sort through and throw out everything that wasn't a foil-lined energy bar wrapper, the Jackson Hole News & Guide reports.
The center needed to collect 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of wrappers before shipping them.
Clif Bar pledges on its website to create packaging that’s 100% “reusable, recyclable, or compostable” by 2025. The company did not respond to News & Guide requests for comment.
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) - A program to recycle energy bar wrappers is ending in a Wyoming town known for outdoor sports and elsewhere.
After four years, a recycling center in Jackson will stop taking Clif Bar wrappers. Clif Bar offered the recycling since 2008 through a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specializing in hard-to-recycle materials. The Jackson Hole News & Guide reports the company collected the wrappers to be melted down into hard plastic. It donated a penny per wrapper to the American Releaf Program, which plants trees in areas affected by wildfires, mining, development and other disruption.
The program raised about $500,000 from wrappers collected at 14,500 locations.
February is National Reading Month. Working at the Dalton-Whitfield County Public Library for a couple of years during college solidified my love of reading books of all kinds. Though I work somewhere surrounded by recycling instead of books now, there are still plenty of great reads for kids and adults about going green that I’ve come to enjoy. Here are some of my recommendations for some eco-friendly reads this month;
• "Hey, That’s Not Trash" by Renee Jablow: This is a great interactive book for especially young readers. It goes over a young boy teaching those around him what goes in the recycling instead of the trash. Your child can also get practice with special press-out pieces that they then place in paper, plastic or metal bins on the book. It’s a great way to introduce the idea of sorting for recycling and I know some adults that may benefit from a reminder, too! You can also have a great discussion after reading about how children also have the power to influence people around them no matter how young they are.
• "Retrieving With EVIE" by Susan Harp: Created initially as a project for Keep Evansville Beautiful, this fun story is a great teaching tool about cleaning up litter. It’s also inspired by a real labrador who has her own Facebook page where she can interact with fans. Perfect for any young animal lover!
• "Michael Recycle" by Ellie Bethel: This book is perfect for Dr. Seuss fans and has great illustrations. This is better for elementary-age students that have some concept of what recycling is. This book focuses on superhero Michael Recycle as he visits a stinky and messy town. He teaches the town people how to take care of their town through recycling and picking up trash and it transforms the town into a beautiful place to live. It would be a great read before or after participating in a litter cleanup as a family and letting your child be their own superhero creating a better town to live in.
• "Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste" by Bea Johnson: From TED talk speaker Bea Johnson, this book covers how to use five simple steps to living more simply and creating a better planet. It focuses on beginning with refusing new waste and reducing how much we consume and then looking at recycling and composting as a last resort. This story combines an inspirational story with practical tips and routines for creating less waste. If you are just beginning to understand the full process of how we come to use so many things and learning that nothing just “goes away,” this is the book for you.
• "Make Garbage Great" by Tom Szaky and Albe Zakes: Written by the creators of Terracycle, a company focused on recycling hard to recycle materials like cigarette butts, this book covers recycling tips, do-it-yourself projects and fun stories connected to our collective pop culture connections and how it relates to our trash. The book is packed full of fun information. Did you know that the invention of paper made by wood was thought up while watching wasps creating their nests using wood fibers?
• "1,000 Ideas for Creative Reuse" by Garth Johnson: Some books are good to curl up in a cozy chair with and read, others are great for bedtime stories and sometimes you just need a good coffee table book. "1,000 Ideas for Creative Reuse" is great book to pick up and flip through from time to time. It’s a unique visual arts book showcasing work by artists using materials such as jelly candies and turning them into a hat or using milk jugs to create amazing and vibrant sculptures. For a coffee table book that can spark conversation, pick this one up.
Halloween is far behind us, but the collection of sunken candy packaging continues at LaRocque School. Teacher Dominique Hébert has established a partnership with the company Avrac A'davrac in order to pick up these papers which cannot be recovered.
The initiative had a lot of talk in October: the co-founder of Effect PH, Hélène Boissonneault, had collected in some forty drop-off points all these types of packaging (chocolate bars, chips, etc.) by handing them over to TerraCycle , a company which gives a second life to this type of waste.
Each class has its basket and a student is responsible for emptying it. "The children made video capsules to find out what to put in the box," says the teacher, who took care of the project at Halloween.
The teacher, who had difficulty finding a budget for the project, approached various organizations before Avrac A'davrac agreed to sponsor the school box. “What we said to each other is that we are training citizens, we want them to be eco-responsible. We want to make them aware of the environment, to pay attention to the planet, because we don't have planet B! "
The children wrote humorous scenarios for the broadcasting of the capsules.
Dominique Robert advocates for a better integration of environmental protection in schools. “The ecological aspect is up to our motivations. I think schools have to rethink that, ”she illustrates, giving the example of a budget for ecological initiatives. This place of the environment is all the more important as the ecological footprint of schools is large, she underlines by adding that certain initiatives should extend to all schools. "Is it up to us to do it?" Yes, as citizens, but how can we make institutions responsible so that it becomes collective and community action? "
The presence of collection boxes on Halloween had the effect of raising awareness among the children, who had not yet wondered about the fate of their candy, chocolate or other packaging.
"I never looked at whether we could put them in recycling," says Iona Gendron.
Owner of Avrac A'davrac, François Vincent notes that the initiative launched during Halloween week has indeed made people aware of what is happening with their packaging. “It gives a visual when you see tons and tons of garbage bags. It’s tangible. It's a huge amount of plastic, it makes you aware of that ... "However, we must pay attention to the opposite effect, notes Mr. Vincent, recalling that it is not because we can now recycle these packaging that we must encourage their consumption, the objective being to reduce at the source. Mr. Vincent believes that it is through laws and regulations that things can change.
The grocery store now offers its customers the possibility of paying $ 20 per year to dispose of their non-recyclable packaging in order to send it to Terracycle.
Dominique Hébert specifies that other projects are underway. It wishes to install three-way bins, to recover paper and cardboard, plastic and non-recoverable packaging intended for TerraCycle. "We are going to apply for financial assistance from the School Board Foundation," she said, stressing the importance of getting children used to sorting materials.
One of Teton County’s lesser-known recycling programs is saying sayonara.
Friday will be the last day for people to drop their Clif Bar wrappers at the recycling center. The sports bar company is ending its recycling program, which Teton County Integrated Solid Waste and Recycling has participated in for four years. Those who have gotten used to saving up their Clif packaging and foil-lined wrappers will have to find a new home for them at the end of this week.
“Everything’s going to have to go in the trash,” said Carrie Bell, Teton County Integrated Solid Waste and Recycling’s waste diversion and outreach coordinator.
Since 2008, Clif Bar has operated the program in partnership with TerraCycle, a company that specializes in recycling “hard-to-recycle materials.”
People could collect foil bar wrappers and packing materials manufactured by Clif and ship them to be melted down into hard plastic, which was used to make new recycled products. The company would donate a penny per wrapper to the American Releaf Program, which plants trees in areas affected by wildfires, pests and disease, as well as mining, development and forest clearing. The program raised $500,000 over the 12 or so years it operated, according to its website.
For the county the program was a bit of work. The recycling center needed to store about 50 pounds of wrappers before it could send them to TerraCycle. That took up a lot of storage. Shipping that quantity of wrappers happened three times in Bell’s tenure.
Recycling center workers also had to sift through the disposal box and throw out anything that wasn’t a foil-lined energy bar wrapper. Foil-lined medical waste and chip bags frequently found their way into the bin, but didn’t qualify.
“It was pretty time consuming on our end,” Bell said.
Still, she said, the program was consistent, which was a positive.
“We don’t want to open our door and close it frequently because we don’t want to send mixed messages by any means,” Bell said. “The energy bar wrapper program was great because it was a stable program for a long time.”
Now she wonders what will happen with Clif’s wrappers. One of the sustainable packaging pledges on the company’s website is to create packaging that’s 100% “reusable, recyclable, or compostable” by 2025.
Bell said she hadn’t seen much from Clif explaining how it would reach that goal. Its website is vague, and the company did not respond to the News&Guide’s requests for comment.
With the recycling program reaching its close, Bell questioned how wrappers, which will have to be thrown out for now, will affect the waste stream. If something is labeled as compostable, she said, but is not being composted, “it’s not really better than anything they had before.” And with recycling becoming more complicated, Bell wonders if creating a new formula for the wrappers would make it harder to recycle the packaging than before.
“I just want to make sure the direction they’re moving really is better than what they were doing before,” she said. “Prior to the change, these energy bar wrappers were actually being recycled and used to make more energy bar wrappers.”
Take your Clif and foil-lined bar wrappers to the Recycling Center by Friday so they can make it onto the final shipment to TerraCycle.
“Now is the time to bring them,” Bell said. After this week “they’re going to go in the trash.”
