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TerraCycle, Teaching Our Young through Worm Poop
Courtesy of TerraCycle, Inc.
What does fundraising, soda bottles, yogurt cups, drinking pouches, and worm poop have in common? Give up? I know that is a tough set of words to figure out the correlation. Just ask the innovative folks over at TerraCycle, maker of worm poop fertilizer and other assorted eco-friendly gardening products. They will tell you that it’s their mission to rid the world of waste through creating innovative uses of products that you would ordinarily throw away. Their worm poop product is bottled in recycled soda bottles.
How does this involve our young? What better way to teach this lesson than to create fundraisers involving children to collect items that can be reused? If our young can be taught at an early age to respect the Earth, then when they grow up as adults this thought process will be second nature to them. This is what the TerraCycle clan is banking on. They are planting the seeds in our children, and nurturing this “help the Earth” concept. This is not much different than what their worm poop fertilizer does for plants.
So back to the yogurt cups, drinking pouches, and fundraising. How are they going to accomplish the goal of starting with our young? They have teamed up with various companies to start collection brigades to reuse these products and offer schools, religious organizations, and charities money to collect certain items for TerraCycle. To be honest, I can’t keep up with their fundraising efforts to benefit schools and other charities. Check their website often to make sure those crazy kids over at TerraCycle have not added another fundraising program. Right now, listed below are their collection brigades:
Yogurt Cups
TerraCycle has teamed up with Stonyfield to collect 6 or 32 ounce yogurt containers made by Stonyfield and Dannon Yogurt and turn them into plant pots. In turn, the Company will pay 2 cents per 6 ounce container, and 5 cents per 32 ounce container that is collected. Click here for the specifics of the fundraiser. Anyone can collect these cups and designate which charity, community group, or religious organization you wish the money to be donated to. This yogurt donation program is only available in the following states: CT, DC, DE, MA, MD, ME, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VA, VT and WV.
The Company will be selling these recycled pots to retailers, who have in the past sold black plastic pots that cannot be recycled. Millions of plastic pots are thrown out every year. (A real pet peeve of mine.)
Soda Bottles
Although TerraCycle has put this soda bottle program on hold, I wanted to mention it because they are in desperate need of a corporate sponsor. This program has grown in leaps and bounds to 4000 locations in just a year and a half. Unfortunately, the costs to ship the collection boxes has dramatically increased with this small company being forced to scale back and close the program to new members.
“The Bottle Brigade is designed to help teach children about the importance of saving the environment and conserving resources. More then half of our locations are primary schools and teaching these young kids to “reduce, reuse and rethink” is a vital mission of our program. However we simply cannot continue to grow this great program without financial support. With a sponsor we can continue to sign up locations. Sponsorship would help us clear out our waiting list of hundreds of locations. It could also help us to develop an entire recycling and reusing curriculum to send to participating schools!”
For those still able to participate, the Company, as of October 1, will be paying .06 per unlabeled clean soda bottle. They package their worm poop in these bottles. If you work at any large corporation, please consider pitching the idea of corporate sponsorship so that TerraCycle can continue this valuable program. For more information on corporate sponsorship, click here.
Drinking Pouches
How many of you pack you children’s lunches with drink pouches? Did you realize that millions end up in landfills every year? Well, TerraCycle and Honest Kids are trying to change this by collecting drink pouches and paying organizations 2 cents per Honest Kids drink pouches or 1 cent for any other type of drink pouch. So, you are thinking, what is TerraCycle going to do with all those drink pouches? Turn them into the ultimate eco-fashion bag. Now your kids can accuse you of wearing your food on your clothes instead of the other way around! Click here about details of this program.
Although TerraCycle is a young company with young leadership, its ideas of teaching the young are founded on old traditions. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, and in turn, this child will help save the Earth.
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on April 13th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
What a good use for old bottles. A product that teaches “re-use”, recycling and ecology at the same time. Go TerraCycle!
J Sloan’s last blog post..Kalashnikov Vodka Bottle?
on April 13th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
J Sloan, I went to your blog and the antique bottle are so beautiful. I love the bottle in your vodka article. Anna
on August 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
[...] Last year, I wanted to buy eco-friendly binders for them. I looked into both the recycled vinyl coated and cardboard binders. The vinyl coated ones were too expensive especially when you have to buy multiple notebooks for many children. The cardboard notebooks were only available via the Internet, so I was not able to see how sturdy they were. Plus, I had to pay shipping for a box full of binders. So, I ended up buying the standard heavy duty binders hoping they would last the whole year. Guess what? They did not and are clogging up a landfill as I write this article. When I received a press announcement from TerraCycle, the worm poop people, that they had teamed up with OfficeMax to carry TerraCycle’s eco-friendly office/school supplies, which included the cardboard binder, I was beyond excited. Since OfficeMax is nearby, I no longer had to pay for shipping, and I could see if the binders were sturdy. In addition to the binders, OfficeMax will carry TerraCycle’s eco pencil holders, All Purpose Cleaner, Window Cleaner, Degreaser, trash cans and recycling bins. TerraCycle is an innovative company that turns waste into usable products. The Company collects such items as yogurt cups, Nabisco and Chips Ahoy cookie wrappers and Cliff Bar wrappers from schools and other not for profit institutions via fundraising programs. I have previously written about their fundraising programs in my article entitled, “Eco Fundraising Made Easy and Profitable” and “TerraCycle, Teaching to our Young through Worm Poop.” [...]