Ziploc sandwich bags, Capri Sun juice pouches, chip bags and the plastic wrap that protects a homemade cookie will all be thrown away after every lunch, destined to release carbon emissions in a landfill. St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Glenn Burnie is taking steps to reduce its carbon footprint and, at the same time, cash in. A year ago, St. Paul’s partnered with the New Jersey recycling company TerraCycle’s Drink Pouch Brigade to recycle juice pouches.

Would you believe discarded Ziploc bags and juice pouches could be worth more than $3,000? Students at a Burlington County elementary school believe it now, thanks to one woman's extraordinary recycling efforts and generosity. On Thursday night, the Burlington County Education Association and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection honored retiree LuAnn Doyle for her contribution to both the school and the environment. From Feb. 2011 until late May of this year, Doyle collected waste from school meals during lunch hours at Hawthorne Park Elementary School in Willingboro, N.J. She recycled the items and gave the money made from it back to the school. All told, she saved more than 160,000 items from the landfill and raised $3,274.15. Here's the breakdown of what she collected: 29,145 juice pouches

Dear Parents, Our TerraCycle brigade has been going well! Instead of going into the landfill, these hard-to-recycle items are being turned them into affordable green products! For more information about the TerraCycle program and products, visit www.TerraCycle.net. Thank you, everyone, for your collection efforts!

With the wide variety of individual-size packaging for food products, creating a portable lunch that will please youngsters’ tastebuds is easier than ever. However, it also causes more waste, which leads to fuller wastebaskets, and eventually, fuller landfills. That’s where the program TerraCycle comes in. The company, headquartered in New Jersey, collects difficult-to-recycle food packaging and turns it into extra money for schools. Three area schools currently are participating in this program: Bad Axe Elementary, Owendale-Gagetown Area Schools and Our Lady of Lake Huron Catholic School in Harbor Beach.

Angela See remembers looking at the back of a Capri-Sun drink box when something caught her attention. It was a logo promoting TerraCycle, a recycling company, which collects food packaging for recycling.

Angela See remembers looking at the back of a Capri-Sun drink box when something caught her attention. It was a logo promoting TerraCycle, a recycling company, which collects food packaging for recycling. TerraCycle's program, known at Brigade, enlists the community's help in collecting items that typically couldn't be recycled so it can be repurposed into other products.

When the warranty expires right before your appliance or electronic device does, you might just have to get rid of it. How does a person deal with departed devices and otherwise good garbage? Try these green options: 1. It’s reincarnation for stuff. Field Park School (Western Springs) participates in this mail-in Terracycle program. You send them recyclables and they turn them into new stuff. Ziploc bags, juice pouches and chip bags are among the edible receptacles they turn into collectibles.

Friday was the 2nd day of school with my latest crop of 3rd graders....and the first Friday, which means it is our weekly "Capri Sun Collect and Count" day in my classroom. For the last 3 years, one of our 3rd grade duties is to go around to all the classes to gather up the bins of juice pouches, chip bags, ziplock bags, and glue sticks that we upcycle to TerraCycle. Given my new batch of worker bees, I wanted to share with them the TerraCycle back-story so that they had more insight as to why it is that we do what we do at our Maryland Green School.

Teacher Heidi Hanner who is leading the “Garden” effort explains how Field Park students learn to conserve, “We just started the TerraCycle program,” she said. “We collect and send in items that would otherwise be trash (used Ziploc bags, juice pouches, chip bags, Clif Bar wrappers) and they are made into something else.”