Solve and Benefit

TerraCycle’s team of scientists and designers have found ways to recycle and upcycle the waste we collect into cool new products. When we upcycle a piece of waste we leverage both the material it is made from and the original shape of the waste. When we recycle we transform the collected waste into new products through a variety of processes like injection molding. Best of all, when you're done with a TerraCycle product you can put it back in the original Brigade collection program and get credit for the waste a second time. One Brigade focuses on collecting candy wrappers. Participating in a TerraCycle Brigade is totally free. There are no signup or participation fees, and the shipping is covered by the program. Once you have joined the Candy Wrapper Brigade®, simply follow the steps below to receive your TerraCycle points:

Markers, unfortunately, can’t be recycled and reused at home (beyond wetting the tips to try to get more ink out of them). However, they can be mailed in to a recycling program that will use the plastic housing to make new products. We have two mail-in programs available to us through Prang and TerraCycle. Another mail-in option hosted by TerraCycle is called the Writing Instrument Brigade, which will accept markers, permanent markers, highlighters, pens and mechanical pencils. Go to www.terracycle.com and click on the menu item called “Send Your Waste,” then click on “Collection Programs.” At the bottom of the list you’ll find the brigade for writing instruments, click on that and you’ll see the instructions for registering and printing out the pre-paid shipping label. Just like the Prang Power Recycling Program, the Writing Instrument Brigade requires 7 pounds worth of writing instruments, about 250 items before shipping. However, you can send a variety of brands. It may be best to partner with friends, family or your kids’ classroom to gather enough pieces. After the items are received by TerraCycle they will credit you with points that can go towards a nonprofit or school of your choice.

Now that Summer has ended….and we are putting up the Summer clothing and shoes and breaking out our Fall and Winter items….it is a great opportunity to get rid of your old, worn-out flip flops. Instead of just tossing those in the trash, check out Flip-Flop Brigade  and you can earn you a FREE pair of NEW Flip Flops (so you’ll be ready for next Summer) as well as some HOT Old Navy coupons….   Through TerraCycle’s partnership with Old Navy, consumers can do the right thing for the environment and their wallets and recycle their old flip flops for free through the Flip Flop Brigade. For every 25 pairs collected, participants receive a coupon for free flip flops and a packet of coupons for $10 off an Old Navy purchase to share with those that helped in the collection efforts. These might come in handy for Back-to-School shopping! The program is open to anyone, free to join, and all shipping costs are paid. For more info, please visit http://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/oldnavy.html. Aside from this program, flip flops are not widely recyclable and usually have no end-of-life solution besides the landfill. It is estimated that 1.3 million tons of flip flops are thrown away each year. After a couple of hundred years, when flip flops finally start to break down, they can leach chemicals into the ground and the air. TerraCycle and Old Navy had a month-long flip flop collection program in 2011 and the year-round collection program was instituted by popular request. In addition to the Flip Flop Brigade, TerraCycle collects about 45 different kinds of products and packaging including personal care and beauty waste, household cleaner packaging, Solo cups, chip bags, drink pouches, writing instruments and much more. TerraCycle awards points for each one of these items sent in. These points can be used for charity gifts or converted to cash and donated to a favorite charity or school. Since 2007, we’ve kept 2.3 billion pieces of waste from ending up in landfills and paid over $4 million to schools and non-profits. People who are interested in signing up for these or any other TerraCycle programs should visit www.terracycle.com.

Here at UC Davis we recycle bottles and cans, cardboard and Styrofoam, CDs and DVDs, fluorescent bulbs and sticky notes, toner and inkjet cartridges, batteries and electronics, and even wine corks. And paper, of course.   But what about our pens? Starting today (Sept. 14), we can recycle those, too, and other, selected writing implements — adding more “cool” to UC Davis’recent ranking as the nation’s “Coolest School” in Sierra magazine’s evaluation of sustainability in higher education.   Materiel Management, a longtime champion of campus sustainability efforts, is spearheading our newest recycling opportunity, by joining up with theTerraCycle Writing Instruments Brigade.   “Writing instruments?” Why not just call them “pens?”   Because TerraCycle Inc. takes any type of plastic-encased device: pens, mechanical pencils, markers and highlighters (the caps too!). And those correction tape dispensers that we sometimes use to erase what we wrote! But nothing encased in wood or metal. TerraCycle wants only the plastic for reuse in the company’s line of consumer products — storage bins, for example.

The Maricopa Community Colleges and a national company called TerraCycle want to save the planet one pencil at a time. Ten MCC schools are now part of the Writing Instrument Brigade, a program under TerraCycle, in which they box and ship used writing utensils to TerraCycle and receive a monetary donation in return. Since joining the program in early 2012, MCC has shipped more than 6,000 utensils to the organization. With the used and abused pens and pencil, TerraCycle breaks them down and brings them back to life in the form of park benches, watering cans, and recycling bins. TerraCycle launched its recycling programs in 2007 and has since collected more than 2 billion pieces of waste from being discarded in landfills. Through the Writing Instrument Brigade, they have donated more than $3.5 million to charities and schools. “We are 10 colleges, two skill centers and numerous education centers, all dedicated to educational excellence and to meeting the needs of businesses and the citizens of Maricopa County, Arizona,” said Chanda Fraulino, recycle program coordinator for MCC, in a statement. “The sustainability coordinators and several of our colleges collaboratively participate in the TerraCycle brigades. The best part about the Writing Instruments brigade is that we divert waste from the landfill while earning money to support student scholarships.” TerraCycle has many arms reaching into the field of sustainability. They partner with companies like Sanford, who sponsors the Writing Instrument Brigade, and Frito-Lay, who sponsors another program called the Chip Bag Brigade. Overall, there are 90,000 organizations who take part in the “Brigade” recycling and upcycling programs worldwide. MCC is one of 1,300 businesses and organizations who are a part of the Writing Instrument Brigade. With the money coming in from recycling used utensils, MCC is planning to support the Maricopa Foundation for the Sustainability Scholarship fund. These scholarships will be awarded to a student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in sustainability or environmental science. To find out more, visit www.terracycle.com.

When our stuff is thrown away it ends up in a landfill. Now, that’s a really backward way to run a country and care for the planet. We are spending money to build lined and permitted landfills until the hole in the ground is full, and then we spend more on capping that landfill with an engineered and permitted design for that closing. And then we dig another big hole and proceed to fill that one, too. That’s our tax money. We worked to earn it and then, instead of saving it, we throw some away! Plympton does not have roadside trash pick-up. We have a transfer station. We take our trash there, where people are paid to oversee the crushing, sweeping up and seeing that it is picked up for hauling to a landfill. Trucks, truck drivers, gasoline, and all the administrative overhead costs that go with any business all go into hauling away our trash. Can you imagine how costly that is? Check out your town’s budget for that and think about it the next time you throw something away that could be taken out of that costly equation by recycling it. The trash bins would be open for receiving for a longer time, thus reducing the pick-up costs. Recycling would go up, bringing in money for the town. Halifax Town Hall has been collecting bottle caps for a few years now, all because of one little boy whose class was participating in a recycling program. The boy wanted to collect more than anyone else, and he did, with the help of a bunch of women collecting caps all year long. What began as a fun project to help one enthusiastic boy has become a routine practice. It would feel odd now to not remove the cap, thus lowering the value of the bottle, for they are made out of different plastics. Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. We need to pay more attention to the first two, and then, when we no longer can find a use for something, it’s nice to know that we have more options for recycling than what is offered by our town programs. It’s important to reduce our waste of money and our waste of the earth, too. “Terra” is Latin for “earth.” You can join in celebrating the care of our terra firma on April 22, this year’s Earth Day, by following the example set by the third-graders collecting paper and the little boy collecting bottle caps and Kevin helping Franklin Park Zoo via TerraCycle. Let the savings begin!

It’s time for spring cleaning, and the truth is in the trash. It’s springtime, alright. Down by the street there are bottles and packages tossed out of passing cars. I hate the looks of it, and I can’t understand how some people can do that without a bothered conscience. I am only thankful for a memory it elicits. When my children were young I discovered what looked like a bottle dump, except that these weren’t old and they were mostly “nip” bottles. My children confessed that I had stumbled upon their laboratory. They wanted to see what would grow in various mediums such as dirt, water or moss. My sister’s boy began to plead with jealousy that he wanted a lab, too! Don’t you just love children’s creative and sometimes competitive spirit? In a similar spirit, some people are making money by making creative recycling their business. One such company is TerraCycle based in Trenton, N.J. It was founded by the worm poop guy. You know of him, right? I remember the story being in the news but did not realize he has grown from homemade fertilizer to fantastic recycling partnerships all over the world. According to their website, “Founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old Princeton University freshman, TerraCycle began by producing organic fertilizer, packaging liquid worm poop in used soda bottles. Since then TerraCycle has grown into one of the fastest-growing green companies in the world.” TerraCylcing was recently brought to my attention by Kevin Rogers. Kevin works at the Franklin Park Zoo (among other cool places), where they receive some much-needed funds for collecting items usually considered trash. Candy bags, bread bags, cookie packages, cosmetic containers, tooth brushes, floss containers, pens and highlighters are among the items currently being collected. Kevin hopes to expand the benefits by finding locations allowing him to place collection boxes. He would also like to have some attractive containers built by partnering with the schools’ vocational classes. I suggested a Scout might be interested in the idea for an Eagle Scout project. For right now, the project has begun at the Halifax Recycling Center, with drop-offs of potato chip bags, cookie packages and candy bar wrappers. They ask that you please not place these items in your roadside pick-up, but take them to the Recycling Center.