TerraCycle: Recycle For Your School Or Charity

TerraCycle is a fantastic organization which takes used wrappers and turns them into some super cool stuff! They are always coming up with fun and cool ways to recycle, but they also have come up with a way (actually 6 ways) Moms can go green, reduce waste at home, AND raise money for their kids school and/or favorite charity.

TerraCycle realizes Moms have enough things to think about without wondering how to reduce the amount of waste leaving their home and heading to the local landfill. So they have come up with six new Brigades (read as free collection programs!) to make it easier than ever for parents to eliminate waste from their home while raising money for a school or charity of their choice. All they need to do is collect and send in the packaging you discard every day, TerraCycle pays the postage and contributes two cents per unit of waste returned. I keep mine in a bag by the pantry to make things easier to send in. My kids go through oreo's and chips ahoy like madmen LOL.

Signing up is easy, just visit their site to sign up your kid’s school. They have increased the number of acceptable materials types to 28 kinds of packaging and products. Here they are:

The Colgate Oral Care Brigade:
The leading dental care brand Colgate is the sponsor of TerraCycle’s newest Brigade, which will provide fundraising and educational opportunities for schools and non-profits nationwide. This is the world’s first program to collect used toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes to be repurposed to new items. For each tube or brush collected, Colgate will pay two cents to a school or non-profit of the collector’s choice. The tubes and brushes will be upcycled into a range of sustainable, high-quality products ranging from bathroom items to school products available by 2011 at major retailers nationwide.

The Home Store Brigade:
The food storage brand Ziploc® will provide fundraising opportunities exclusively for K-12 schools. Through the Ziploc Brigade, schools can collect bags and containers of any size and send them free of charge to TerraCycle to be turned into new plastic-based products. For each bag or container collected, Ziploc and TerraCycle will pay two cents to the school actually doing the collection. With most recycling centers around the country taking only plastics 1 and 2, this is an excellent way to keep plastics numbering 3-7 out of landfills.

The Spreads Brigade:
Unilever and TerraCycle have created the Spreads Brigade where participants will be paid two cents for each container of Country Crock, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Promise and Brummel & Brown they return. Since many recycling centers do not currently except #5 plastic this is the first time these tubs will be collected on a wide scale. The money earned will go to a charity of the collector’s choice.

The Lunch Kit Brigade:
In addition to accepting Capri Sun drink pocuhes, Oscar Mayer Lunchables are the latest Kraft Food brand to launch a TerraCycle collection program. With the incredible success of the Capri Sun program, which launched in 2008 and now has more than 35,000 participating locations, Kraft decided to add the popular Lunchables brand. Called the Lunch Kit Brigade™, TerraCycle and Kraft will pay postage and two cents per unit of packaging returned to a charity of the collector’s choice. TerraCycle will then find new uses for the packaging, keeping it out of landfills.

The Neosporin Tube Brigade:
NEOSPORIN®, the number one doctor-recommended brand of topical antibiotic ointment, has partnered with TerraCycle to provide families the opportunity to discard their expired NEOSPORIN tubes in an eco-friendly way. Families are encouraged to join one of the 1,000 "NEOSPORIN Tube Brigades" around the country to collect expired tubes from their home and community. TerraCycle will recycle expired or empty NEOPSORIN tubes to help eliminate the risk of these products going into landfills. Each NEOSPORIN tube sent by a brigade to TerraCycle will raise $.02 for a non-profit organization or school of the collector’s choice.

The Aveeno Beauty Brigade:
In a program designed to help Moms reduce their carbon footprint, Aveeno tubes will be collected to raise money for local communities while saving millions of used tubes from landfills. Aveeno and TerraCycle will pay two cents for each returned tube with proceeds going to local non-profits or The Skin Cancer Foundation. Participation is free and all shipping costs are paid.

In late 2009, TerraCycle added two collection programs, which are carrying over into 2010.

The Scott & Huggies Brand Brigades:
Kimberly-Clark, already a trusted leader in helping people improve their health, hygiene, and well being, and TerraCycle are providing a FREE way for consumers to make a difference in their communities. The company’s partnership with TerraCycle creates new programs that allow participants to earn two cents for their charity of choice for every used piece of plastic packaging associated with SCOTT® or Huggies brands they collect. The collected plastic packaging will be upcycled into affordable, high-quality products.

The Sprout Brigade:
Sprout®, the increasingly popular organic baby food brand co-founded and created by chef Tyler Florence, has partnered with TerraCycle to recover and reuse its food pouches through TerraCycle’s Brigades. The Sprout Brigade will collect empty food pouches and pay two cents per pouch to a charity of the collector’s choice. The used pouches will then be upcycled into baby-related items such as a hip diaper wallet, bibs, backpacks and totes.

Through the Brigades, TerraCycle and its sponsors help schools or other community groups raise money for a charitable organization of the collector’s choice, which can include his or her own school. Participation is free and all shipping costs are paid. To date, over 1.8 million units of waste have been diverted from landfill. Plus TerraCycle and its sponsors paid over $800,000 dollars to over 50,000 schools or non-profits. To see the full range of items TerraCycle collects and pays for, visit http://www.terracycle.net/.

Thanks, My Atlanta Mommy!

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