Thursday, January 23, 2014

May TerraCycle Be With You


Have you ever heard of TerraCycle? Well, if you haven’t, it’s a company that collects and processes items that would normally be considered waste. At Shadow Lake, we collect juice pouches to ship to TerraCycle. Ms. Fink has been collecting juice pouches at Lake Wilderness. When Ms. Fink has enough pouches to fill a large garbage bag, (about 500 pouches) Ms. Castagna drives them to Shadow Lake when she comes to work there.

Mrs. White, Mrs. Chase, and Green Team members squeeze out the leftover juice, flatten the pouches, push the straws in so they don’t puncture the bag and leak, and put them into stacks of 10 for easy counting. Then Mrs.Chase and Mrs.White pack 100 pouches into gently-used gallon-size Ziploc bags (100 in each gallon bag). These 100-count bags are then placed in a very large box for shipping.

When the count reaches over 45 lbs or around 3,000 juice pouches, Mrs. White or Mrs. Chase transport the boxes to the nearest UPS store and ship the oversized boxes to TerraCycle in New Jersey. Once there, TerraCycle workers can turn the used juice pouches into backpacks, pencil cases, benches, fences, bags, and many more upcycled products that you can buy online at Dwellsmart! Need a unique gift for someone special and help your environment at the same time--check out Dwellsmart!  

Our compliments to Shadow Lake and Lake Wilderness for their excellent work as collaborative workers!


Guest Post by Cara L. and Kyle S.
Shadow Lake Elementary Green Team