One company helping to recycle discarded personal care and beauty products and packaging is L’Occitane. You can now walk into any L’Occitane store in the U.S. and Canada and drop off your bathroom empties for recycling, regardless of brand... TerraCycle’s Zero Waste Boxes are easy solutions you can use wherever you are. Pick from a variety of boxes, such as the Bathroom Separation or Personal Care Zero Waste Box, and send to TerraCycle when full.

To give you an idea of how popular pens still are, consider this: Through a popular recycling program available at 300 Staples locations across Canada, TerraCycle and Staples have worked together to provide a second life for many writing instruments. How many? 1.4 million so far! That is a lot of school permission notes! In fact, these stores will accept almost any writing utensil, including all brands of pens and caps, mechanical pencils, markers and marker caps, highlighters/caps, and permanent markers.

Last year, TerraCycle collected tens of millions of cigarette butts from more than 50 cities in the U.S. alone. This year, it plans to exceed those numbers. Cigarette butts are the world's most littered item with nearly 4.5 trillion being tossed each year. Last year in the United States, it is estimated 1.69 billion pounds of butts ended up as toxic waste.

NOW, Bloomingdale, IL, an independent and family-owned manufacturer of natural products in the U.S. health food store channel, has partnered with recycling expert TerraCycle to divert NOW’s flexible packaging from landfills. The NOW Recycling Program enables consumers the opportunity to recycle their toothpaste tubes and flexible food and supplement pouches—items not accepted by most municipal recycling programs.

Toothpaste tubes and flimsy pouch packaging aren’t accepted by most municipal-run, curbside recycling programs, but NOW is giving customers the option to send back empty packaging of these types to get recycled through a partnership with New Jersey-based TerraCycle, which works with corporations, manufacturers, municipalities, and individual households to process hard-to-recycle materials.

In addition to cost, some people object to the amount of waste created by disposable products. While contact lenses and blister packs can't be recycled locally, they can be collected and periodically sent to TerraCycle for recycling. This program is sponsored by Bausch + Lomb, but all brands of lenses and blister packs are accepted. The cardboard boxes that lenses come in can simply be recycled as usual.

Q: What is Subaru's new recycling program?...A: Hudiburg Subaru in Oklahoma City is accepting "hard-to-recycle" items such as snack/candy wrappers, disposable cups/lids and coffee/tea/creamer pods to be transformed by our partner, TerraCycle, into useful items like park benches, playground equipment and more. The items created from the recycled materials then will be donated to community partners connected to the more than 540 Subaru retailers participating in the initiative.

Here are a few ideas that should help point you in the right directions. This is by no means a comprehensive list. Please add suggestions on our Facebook page and let other locals know other easy ways to avoid filling the landfill faster... Waste collected through the Terracycle program turns cigarettes and their plastic package wrappers into plastic pallets and compost.