How schools can make money – TerraCycle
By Susan Wilson
One way to feel righteous about eating junk food is to know that your wrapper or container will be recycled. TerraCycle recycles a wide variety of things including chips wrappers from Frito Lay and Nabisco toasted chips.
TerraCycle has entered into new agreements with Frito Lay and Nabisco to recycle the wrappers from chips. They also recycle Nabisco cookie wrappers, juice pouches, Kashi products boxes, Bare Naked products wrappers, wine corks, other products wrappers and cell phones.
Collection boxes are mailed to collection sites that sign up to collect certain items. School cafeterias and lounge areas from elementary school through college would be excellent recycle sites. Just sign up for your recycle collection container/box and set it next to the trash can. Piece of cake.
Not only will the various collected items stay out of a landfill, they will also be recycled, or as TerraCycle calls it upcycled, for use as packaging for new products that TerraCycle sells in such stores as Wal-Mart and Office Depot.
The products are made out of 100 percent recycled material. Everything from Binders, to plant food. The original product was plant food that was made from worm poop and from there the co-founders branched into upcycling all kinds of different products.
The two co-founders, Tom Szaky and Jon Beyer, noticed that plants grew better when fertilized with worm poop that came from feeding scraps to worms. After deciding to start a company based on the concept of creating large amounts of worm waste to sell, the founders started looking for packaging and started collecting used soda bottle to package their product. The rest, as they say is history.
One of the great rewards of TerraCycle’s upcycling program is that the company pays a certain amount of money per item. It varies from item to item. For example, the company pays $.02 per wrapper and $.25 per cell phone. Collection boxes on campuses would collect thousands of wrappers, and used cell phones keeping them out of land fills. Depending on who sponsored the collection boxes, a school club, student council, or the school itself could make extra money.
Not bad for simply collecting trash.
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