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Our Community Goal is to help schools & nonprofits earn extra money for projects that are important to them. The other part of our community goal is to keep recyclable items out of the landfill! Why throw good money away when schools & nonprofits need the extra money to fund needed programs?

Please share this community project through your social media channels. We are seeking schools & nonprofits to work with who may want to be partners with us in this recycling project. They will earn needed money and help the environment!

Funding for schools has been slashed due to the budget deficit. Funding for nonprofits plummeted after the Great Recession and have not fully recovered. Both nonprofits & schools fulfill necessary missions in our community but have very little money to deal with monumental tasks!

Landfills mar the beauty of our beloved Arizona desert. They also secrete harmful methane gas into the atmosphere and leak toxic chemicals into the underground water that supplies our cities with clean drinking water.

Important Fact: Even the closed landfills in Maricopa County cost taxpayers 3 million dollars to maintain. We can do better! We can help philanthropic organizations earn extra money and help the environment!

Here is a list of all the items that can earn money when they are recycled.

1- Any & All Drink Pouches(Such as Capri-Sun, Kool-Aid, Honest Kids to
include the straws and straw wrappers)

2- Any & All Coffee Pouches(Such as Maxwell House, Equal Exchange
Organic, and Starbucks)

3- Any & All Cookie and Cracker Wrappers(Such as Oreo and Keebler
including the inner trays)

4- Any & All Energy or Breakfast Bar and Food Wrappers(Such as Granola
Bars, Breakfast Bars, Cliff Bars, Oddwalla Bars, Lara Bar, Nut Bags)

5- Any & All Candy Wrappers(Such as M&Ms, Hershey, and Snickers)

6- Any & All Chip and Salty Snack Bags(Such as Frito Lay, Pepperidge
Farm, potato chip, crackers, pretzel, cheeto, nacho, peanut, popcorn,
pork rine and any that look and feel similar)

7- Any & All Lunch Kit Trays, Wrappers, TV Dinner style(such as Lunchables)

8- Any & All Dairy Tub Containers(Such as Stonyfield Farms, Chobani,
Dannon) Butter Type Spread Containers(Such as Country Crock, Promise,
and yes even the little baby single serve sizes) Sour Cream and
Cottage Cheese, etc.

9- Sprout Brand baby Food Containers and Wrappers

10- Any & All Gum Wrappers(Such as Trident, Bubblicious, and Wrigley)

11- Any & All Cereal Bags(Such as Malt-O-Meal, Rice Crispies, and
Honey Nut Cheerios)

12- Bear Naked Brand Granola and Cereal Product Wrappers

13- Any Kashi Brand Food Product Wrappers

14-Candy wrappers

15- Any & All Corks Real and Fake Plastic from wine and other liquor bottles

16- Any & All Disposable Household Tape Dispensers(Such as Scotch)

17- Any & All Home Storage Bags and Containers(such as Glad zip lock
style Bags, ceran wrap, sandwich bags, and temporary tupperware
plastic containers)

18- Any & All Paper Towel and similar Paper Product Wrappers(Such as
Scotts Paper Towels, Tissue Paper, Paper Napkins etc)

19- Any & All Tooth Paste Tubes, Dental Floss Devices, and used
Toothbrushes(Such as Colgate, Crest, etc)

20- Any & All Glue Containers and Glue Sticks(Such as Elmers)

21- Any & All Human Writing Instruments except Chalk and Crayons(Such
as Used Up or Broken Pens, Sharpies, Markers, Highlighters, Magic
Markers, and Mechanical Pencils, Wooden Pencils)

22- Any & All Beauty and Skin Care Product Tubes and Containers(Such
as Aveeno and Aveda Skin Product Tubes, Neosporin Medicine Containers,
Lip Stick Tubes, Cosmetic Cases, Chap Stick Tubes, Shampoo Bottles,
Deodorant Sticks and Sun Screen Tubes and Bottles)

23 -Any & All Diaper Wrappers(such as Huggies, Pampers, g-Diaper and
any sort of Baby Sanitation Wipe as well as Incontinence Pad Wrappers)

24- Any & All Cell Phones, MP3 players, Digital Cameras, GPS Systems,
Calculators, Printer and Toner Cartridges, and Laptop Computers
including all cords and chargers

25- Any & All Flexible Cheese Wrappers (such as Kraft, Kroger, Sargento)

26- Any & All Tortilla and Tostada Wrappers(such as Mission Tortillas)

27- Any and All Home Cleaning Containers and Items(such as Windex,
Pledge, Ajax, and Toilet Brushes) (Sponsored by Method!)

28- Any and All #5 & #6 disposable plastic drinking cup(Solo Cups)

29- Any and All Laundry and Dish Wash Detergent Briquette Bags

30-Any and All Wine Pouches

31-Any and All Hummus Products (like Athenos Hummus) (0.0508 pounds)

32-Any and All Shoes

33-Any and All Cigarette & Cigar Waste including all the ashes,
unburnt tobacco, filter stubs, plastic outer wrap, aluminum paper inner wrap. (3 pound minimum)

As you probably remember my pretty small 200 member Church back home in Athens, GA a good hour East of Atlanta, has earned about $7,000 in 3 years by keeping almost 300,000 pieces of previously considered “Unrecyclable” out of the landfill and instead shipped it off separated to TerraCycle to make new and interesting things out of what was known once as “trash”. We were Tithing with Trash and to keep it secular you can Raise Money with Rubbish!

A Non-Profit can sign up for free with little info and see more at TerraCycle.com . Each waste stream is organized into Brigades, like the Salty Snack/Chip Bag Brigade, Scotch Tape Brigade, Energy Bar BDE, & Dental Care BDE to name a few! There are over 40 Brigades and must be separated into those categories. TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky stated that they will never landfill or incinerate things on their accepted list, as well as when one buys plastic lumber there is a one in three
chance it came from TerraCycle.

Two cents each doesn’t sound like much, but like everything else it really adds up. To add to the benefit with you all Recycling,
Composting, and hopefully TerraCycling you can seriously slash or maybe eliminate your dumpster bills! TerraCycle has so far awarded over 6 Million Dollars to Non-Profits Across the Country by keeping over 2 Billion pieces of Waste out of the landfill.

Vancouver was recently able to cut their Side Walk and Street Side Cigarette Waste by 90% after working with TerraCycle to install Butt Cans that advertised the Recycling of perhaps the worst and dirtiest form of Solid Waste. Portland, OR has
also added this exact same effort to their endeavors to grow more sustainable.

The Formula for computing TC Potential: (Number of Families that
participate x 25 TerraCycle Items a week x .02 cents each x 52 weeks) = $ Potential. One can adjust the items a week and time measurement but for a School, Church, and most organizations I think the 52 weeks is good. The author of the formula had it at 50 items a week which I thought was a little high so I opted for 25 items a week. Using 435 families with the formula:

435 Families x 25 x .02 cents x 52 = $11,310 a year potential

A Non-Profit can sign up for free right now but lately it seems the Wait List is the fate of some of the really popular Brigades like Chip Bags, Writing Instruments, and Dairy Tubs. That means you are Next in Line behind the 15,000 Schools, Churches, and Scout Troops or so already in that particular Brigade and will be allowed in once some school some where drops the ball and does not send in a shipment in a year or so.

It is necessary to sign up for each separate Brigade, Chip Bag Brigade, Writing Instrument BDE, Dental BDE, Multi-Stream BDE, etc. As I was saying earlier St Gregory is in nearly every worthwhile Brigade and I have got permission from my Priest to issue as many UPS Labels from our account as needed. I then track the specific Non-Profit, the UPS Shipping Number, the weights, and eventually the Dollars and Cents.

When St Gregory gets the TerraCycle Check which happens every 6 months, we keep a small fee such as 20% and then cut a check for the Lion’s Share 80% back to that original Non-Profit who
requested the UPS Label from us and actually collected and mailed it off.

You can contact me via the comment section below with any questions! St Gregory and I officially joined TerraCycle.com in July 2010 and I have learned quite a bit along the way. For instance a few Brigades have minimum shipment weights in
order to get credit. With what TerraCycle wants coupled with a decent City Recycle Program and perhaps Composting Coffee Grounds, Food, and Soiled Paper Waste in nearby wood lines….Zero Waste is just about attainable!