The dedicated collection of the used drink pouches has earned the school a place in the top 100 collecting schools of TerraCycle's Drink Pouch Brigade.
This is a program that has helped the recycling company reach the milestone of 50 million pouches collected; it has also assisted the school's Parent Teacher Group to benefit students.
MOUNT LAUREL — In September, students and staff at the Countryside Elementary School were anticipating a fifth place prize of $10,000 from a contest put on in conjunction with a partnership between Walmart and TerraCycle.
Because of a phenominal effort, they did much, much better. On Feb. 3, Countryside found out it placed second in the contest, winning $30,000.
The contest, which ended on Dec. 15, entailed a big recycling effort mostly led by the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) and participant and parent Kate Esaia.
Esaia was heavily involved in getting the kids and faculty at Countryside School on board with the initiative, which included recycling juice pouches, candy wrappers, Ziploc bags, yogurt containers and snack bags. The recycled goods eventually will be used to create insulated lunch boxes, park benches and fencing, just to name a few.
Even the Ivy League isn't immune to dropouts. Tom Szaky -- a Canadian who didn't know that Princeton was in New Jersey until he got to campus -- left college after two years. Szaky was on fall break during freshman year in Montreal when he saw a bountiful weed (yes, that kind of weed) harvest that owed its success to worm and organic waste. The light bulb went off, and he began packaging worm waste in used soda bottles that later ended up on the shelves of
Home Depot and
Walmart. Over the next year, he would head home after class and work on his business, the way college basketball players head to the gym to work on their free throws. He didn't solicit help from professors and says the faculty was "hands-off" in that respect. By his sophomore year,
TerraCycle was taking off -- he had a logo, a name and a diversified body of products -- and it was now or never.
"I would have loved to stay in school, but TerraCycle was starting to grow and I was putting more time into it," says Szaky, 28, also a member of the AOL Small Business Board of Directors. "I took a semester off, which turned into a permanent leave."
The business has evolved since 2003 -- kites made of Oreo wrappers and picture frames wrapped in bicycle chains, part of the company's "upcycling" line of products, helped catapult revenues to $7.5 million in 2009 -- but he still spends time on campus as a guest lecturer and thinks teaching could be a fun career down the road. For now, he's focused on waste, and he's able to indulge his inner dork with the science of composting. Looks like he didn't need that behavioral economics degree after all, much like other dropouts who felt the need to quit school and
carpe diem.
"I have nothing against school," says Szaky, author of
Revolution in a Bottle. "TerraCycle was happening, and that was the decision at the moment."
MOUNT LAUREL - The Countryside Elementary School has earned a $30,000 grant for placing second in a statewide contest that encourages the "upcycling" of post-consumer packaging.
The "Trash for Cash" program is sponsored by TerraCycle, a Trenton manufacturer of goods made from used materials, and discount retailer Wal-Mart.
In addition to the grant, the school earned $931 in funds for the parent-teacher organization, an award based on the unspecified number of boxes of recycled materials submitted for the contest.
Parents and kids at the K-2 school finished fifth in a statewide recycling contest sponsored by
TerraCycle, a company started by a Princeton University dropout who sold organic “worm poop” fertilizer in used soda bottles and then branched out to make lunch bags, fences and other products from hard-to-recycle materials.
TerraCycle partners with major brands to create products from packaging that otherwise might pose a public relations problem for them.
The company was founded in 2001 by
Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old freshman at Princeton.
When his worm fertilizer idea only finished fourth in the Princeton Business Plan Contest, he left school to develop the concept and won a $1 million competition. He turned down the money to retain control of the company.
TerraCycle now operates from a Trenton headquarters decorated by graffiti artists. The company has turned nearly 2 billion pieces of trash into a line of 246 recycled and “upcycled” products sold by the likes of Walmart and Whole Foods Market. More than $1.6 million has been generated for schools and charities. On Earth Day 2009, Tom Szaky published
Revolution in a Bottle: How TerraCycle is Redefining Green Business.
9. Companies learn to close the loop. Starbucks announced it’s made considerable progress toward turning used coffee cups into new cups, and five Walmart stores began testing a collection system for 28 types of trash (candy wrappers, yogurt tubs, pens, coffee bags) that TerraCycle can convert into tote bags, plant pots, backpacks and portable speakers. Hasbro is increasing the recycled content of its packaging and paper materials to 75 percent this year, and Pepsi-owned Naked Juice is converting all of its bottles to 100 percent post-consumer content.
Countryside Elementary School has earned a $30,000 grant for placing second in a statewide contest that encourages the “upcycling” of post-consumer packaging.
A public school serving children in grades K-4 in Mount Laurel, Countryside community saved 46,554 items from the trash, including juice pouches, candy wrappers, sandwich and snack bags, and yogurt containers. Parent Kate Esaia rinsed them out and prepared the items to be shipped to Terracycle, a Princeton-based international company that creates new products, such as insulated coolers, with the recycled materials.
The “Trash for Cash” contest was sponsored by TerraCycle and Walmart. A total of $125,000 is being awarded to New Jersey schools that contributed the most post-consumer packaging between Oct. 1 and Dec. 15.
A friend of mind recently informed me about some cool research she has been doing I've been doing about a (relatively) new social enterprise called Terracycle. Terracycle is one of the fastest growing green companies in the world. Their website shares a bit more about what they do:
TerraCycle’s purpose is to eliminate the idea of waste. We do this by creating a national recycling systems for the previously non-recyclable. The process starts by offering collect programs (many of them free) to collect your waste and then convert the collected waste into a wide range of products and materials. With over 14 million people collecting waste in 11 countries together we have diverted billions of pieces of waste that are either upcycled or recycled into over 1,500 various products available at major retailers ranging from Walmart<
http://walmart.com/>
to Whole Foods Market <
http://wholefoodsmarket.com/>
. Our hope is to eliminate the idea of waste by creating collection and solution systems for anything that today ends up in our trash.
My friend noticed yesterday that the company has partnered with another organization to create curriculums for teaching kids K-12 about waste, and thought you might find this interesting!
Check out some awesome environmental lesson ideas at:
http://www.terracycle.net/curricula <
http://www.terracycle.net/curricula> .
Enjoy, and help your students be more GREEN today!!
Maxwell Elementary School pupils are saving the world. And they recently received an award for their efforts.
Lynn Davidson/McDuffie Mirror
TerraCycle Inc. named the school among the Top 100 in the nation for recycling drink pouches. Lauren Taylor, of TerraCycle, said Maxwell Elementary was ranked because it had collected 44,517 drink pouches by October.
"Obviously, the children there are passionate about recycling and aware of what steps they can take to protect the environment," Ms. Taylor said. "It's great to see them taking part in such a large-scale project."
A certificate in a frame made from shredded drink pouches was sent to the school and presented during a faculty meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 19. Maxwell Elementary was one of only four elementary schools in Georgia to receive the recognition, according to Ms. Taylor.
TerraCycle provides free waste-collection programs for hard-to-recycle materials. The company transforms the waste into affordable green products, according to its Web site. The company recently reached a milestone. It has collected 50 million drink pouches -- the equivalent to 20 school buses in weight, 480 football fields in length, enough to stretch across the Grand Canyon nine times if laid side-by-side.
"So, the children at Maxwell Elementary helped because the 44,000 they collected contributed to that," Ms. Taylor said.
TerraCycle collects drink pouches, soda bottles, chip bags, candy and gum wrappers, zip-close bags, cheese wrappers, coffee containers and Lunchable containers and turns them into tote bags, lunch bags, book bags, coolers, clipboards, picture frames, bottles, fences and other items, which are sold at Target, Kmart, Walmart, The Home Depot and via its Web site,
www.terracycleshop.com.
