Think you’re great at recycling? How
providing charitable gifts or donations to the non-profit or school of your
choice with your recycled garbage? That’s a win-win isn't it?! Well check out
TerraCycle Inc. a highly-awarded, international upcycling (using every aspect of waste as
value) and recycling company that collects difficult-to-recycle packaging and
products and re-purposes the material into affordable, innovative products. Their
mission is to eliminate the idea of waste, and they do this by creating waste collection
programs (called Brigades). They provide incentive to receive your waste with
free shipping and by awarding TerraCycle points for the waste received which
can be redeemed for charitable gifts or a payment of $.01 per point to the
non-profit or school of your choice.
Join a Waste Stream
Creatively they have created a program with over 40 different
‘waste streams’ that can be received. Collecting the waste of choice is called
a ‘Brigade’. The waste streams include items such as hummus containers,
laptops, inkjet toner cartridges and even cigarette butts. You collect your
waste download a shipping label from your account and send the waste to TerraCycle.
Your location is credited with the TerraCycle points and then the items are
sent to be converted into new products ranging from recycled park benches to upcycled
backpacks. The waste items are transformed into new products through a variety
of
processes like injection molding. Best of all if you purchase one of these
products such as a backpack, when you have worn it out and it is ready to be
recycled you can send it back to TerraCycle and get credit for the waste a
second time. There are over 250 products to choose from, recycled toilet seats,
soap dispensers, garden pavers, you name it!
Collecting Cigarette Butts?
This unique company was founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky then a
20 year old freshman at Princeton
University, and has been written about over
hundreds of times by a wide variety of company’s and news organizations. Most recently TerraCycle played a part of helping
a youth in Detroit win an International Young Eco-Hero Award from the San Francisco
based non-profit Action for Nature. The youth Brianna Moore started the
Green Lifesaver Recycling Foundation to promote recycling. She visits two of
her local parks and wearing gloves collects cigarette butts, bottles and other
trash. She stuffs the cigarette butts into plastic bags, which her local recycling
center doesn't accept, mails them to Terra Cycle. The company recycles them
into plastic pallets and other industrial products.
Become a Partner
You can collaborate or partner with TerraCycle by signing up
for a Brigade and start to collect a waste stream at home, in your office,
or launch a national Brigade program with you company. Or you can use some of
their raw materials made 100% from waste to use in manufacturing products that your
company produces. Or maybe you are a retailer that would like to sell
TerraCycle products. Currently some major retailers like Target, OfficeDepot,
Walmart, e-commerce sites and other stores are selling TerraCycle products.
So think twice before you dropping that hummus container
into your recycle bin, because you could be fertilizing your garden and helping the
non-profit organization of your choice with that cup.
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