Last week, The New York Times published an intriguing article — “As Consumers Cut Spending, ‘Green’ Products Lose Allure” — about a major decline in the sales of green products. The article makes a point I have long believed: the average consumer will not pay more for a product just because it’s green, especially during a recession.

Here middle and elementary students are each deciding how to spend a small portion of $50,000 grant money the school won this year from Walmart by collecting wrappers for reuse by the company TerraCycle. Sixth- through eighth-graders vote on one of three ways to spend $2,500: buy customized flash drives for each student; buy tables, chairs and umbrellas for lunchtime al fresco dining in a school courtyard; or bring in a mini-game show assembly.

EAST AMWELL TWP. — Where most people see trash, the township school’s Environmental Club sees cash. That has won $50,000 for the school, the top prize in a TerraCycle-Walmart contest for New Jersey public schools. It did so by blitzing TerraCycle with 52,640 plastic wrappers and containers during the two-and-a-half-month contest. “You can’t get much greener than this!” exclaimed the club’s adviser, fifth-grade language arts and science teacher Sharon Ernst. It all started in 2008 with Ernst casting about for a way to raise money for an Environmental Club for fourth- and fifth-graders. She wanted to do something applicable to stewardship, which ruled out fundraisers such as bake sales. She considered selling seeds, then a parent mentioned TerraCycle, which pays nonprofit groups that send it hard-to-recycle items for reuse or recycling.

by Tom Szaky of TerraCycle, Trenton NJ Student brigades collect hard-to-recycle trash for TerraCycle. Photo credit: TerraCycle 2010 may have been a rocky year in many ways for a lot of us out there, but something amazing happened in the last three months of the year: Public schools in New Jersey on average doubled how much waste packaging they collected and sent to TerraCycle! What was the catalyst, you say? A surplus of Halloween candy wrappers perhaps? All the packaging from holiday parties and gifts? Nice guesses, but no. It was cash.   Walmart Foundation <http://walmartstores.com/CommunityGiving/203.aspx>  sponsored a contest with us called Trash To Cash <http://www.facebook.com/TerraCycle?v=app_10442206389>  that rewarded the top 6 collecting Brigades <http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/02/www.terracycle.net/brigades>  at New Jersey public schools with grants between $5000-$50,000 dollars, a total of $125,000. The numbers were astounding: The lowest of those winners sent us 22,921 pieces of packaging! The highest clocked in at 52,640. This, for 2 months of collections. Mind boggling, how much trash they helped divert from the landfill. On many levels, the program was a great success. Not only was a large amount of trash diverted, it nearly doubled earlier figures. Not only is there money going to benefit public schools that can surely use it, engagement has increased among the Brigades. Perhaps most significantly, there is new incentive for schools to jump onto the Brigade train, further increasing both the amount and the locations that difficult to recycle packaging is being prevented from ending in a landfill. Hopefully, the momentum created by the Trash To Cash contest continues on long afterwords. Still, toubling questions remain. What does it say about our society if it takes money to motivate the average person to such levels of behavior? Why did a noisy compostable bag motivate people to protest loudly <http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/02/big-lessons-from-the-sunchips-packaging-fiasco.php> , forcing Sunchips to roll back to non-recyclable, non-compostable packaging, for all but one of its products? With changing climate, ecomonic shifts, and dwindling resources, there will need to be some major changes in people's lifestyles. Will they be willing or capable? Is money going to have to be the motivator? Readers, I'd like to hear from you. Is money the answer to a rapid, durable increase in eco friendly behavior? Have you seen it working elsewhere? And if not, what other paths to change have you seen out there that are working? Got a new, as yet to be done idea to share? Let's hear it!

MORRIS TWP. ‑ Woodland Avenue School’s Green Team was given a $10,000 grant award as  winners of the “Trash to Cash Collection Contest” sponsored by the Walmart Foundation and TerraCycle, part of $125,000 in school grants the foundation is handing out.   The contest was free and open to all New Jersey public schools. The schools that raised the most money through TerraCycle's Brigade programs.  The contest began Oct. 1 and ran until Dec. 15. Combined 448 schools in New Jersey helped divert over 1.6 million pieces of packaging in fewer than three months. Walmart Foundation partnered with TerraCycle in order to encourage more schools to get involved in the Brigade program, a socially and environmentally beneficial fund-raising and educational initiative that pays schools to recycle. The hope was that by adding the additional incentive of schools grants, schools would collect more waste, diverting as much non-recyclable material as possible from landfill. "We are extremely pleased with the level of participation in the Trash to Cash Collection Contest,” Jennifer Hoehn, senior manager of Public Affairs for Walmart said. “During a period of just over two months, TerraCycle and Walmart successfully diverted over 1.6 million pieces of waste with the help of New Jersey Brigade participants increasing collections by almost 200 percent during the contest.” For more information, go to www.terracycle.net <http://www.terracycle.net> .

Congrats to the East Amwell Public School in Ringoes, which just won $50,000 in a recycling contest. And Countryside Elementary in Mount Laurel, which raked in $25,000. And all for collecting a few glue bottles, toothpaste types, drink pouches and chip bags. Okay, it was more than a few. A whole lot more than a few. It was 1.6 million. Walmart and Trenton-based Terracycle <http://www.terracycle.net> , a company that seeks new uses for stuff that would otherwise be discarded,  put out the call last fall, challenging schools to get involved in its "Brigade" program. Through it, schools can collect any or all of 35 different materials and ship them to Terracycle, where they're made into other products. For that, Terracycle pays the schools two cents for each item and foots the bill for the shipping.

WALL — The 409 students at Allenwood Elementary School know the lunchtime drill. Grab a plastic foam tray, wait in the lunch line, sit down and eat lunch, then march the recyclable items to the green bins on the table at the front of the room. Cookie wrappers go in one bin, candy wrappers in another. Snack bags, string cheese wrappers, juice pouches and plastic lunch bags each are placed in separate containers. And although the plastic foam trays are not recycled, they are scraped, and fruits and vegetables are saved for the compost bin outside. Then the trays are stacked neatly so they take up as little space as possible in the trash container.