Recycling has always posed significant challenges, especially when it comes to materials deemed “unrecyclable.” Enter TerraCycle, a company with a mission to shake up traditional recycling norms. By aiming to eliminate waste entirely, TerraCycle is tackling these challenges head-on.
Some boxes are free (sponsored by business), others cost around £100 to £200 for a one-off way to get hard-to-recycle trash out of your community (neighbours, schools, offices or councils can sponsor a box or pool between you, for around £2 each). Everything is then recycled, usually into industrial items like packaging or piping.
TerraCycle Zero Waste Bag was recently launched, to recycle most things that you can’t recycle from home (27 categories including flexible plastic packaging, fabrics and Styrofoam™). Just choose a subscription then seal the full bag and scan the QR code (or log into your account) to schedule doorstep pick-up. If many of you do this together, the new items made (like park benches) are donated back to your community!
Free Terracycle Boxes
The free programmes are sponsored by industry, so it won’t cost you anything to order a box for your office or community. You then spend days, weeks or months filling the box up, send it off. Obviously some of these items are best avoided in the first place.
But if you have a big office or government building filled with them (because they are no longer used or you can’t recycle them), now you can! And you can even earn rewards for each valid shipment, to earn stuff for your community or school.
Some people have earned thousands of pounds/dollars for their local area. Shops and other places can also sign up to become public drop-off points, to help quickly fill the boxes for collection:
- Contact lenses & plastic toothbrushes
- Water filter cartridges
- Sweet, crisps & cheese wrappers
- Pringles containers & bread bags
- Hand soap packaging
- Foil balloons
- ‘Flash’ floor wipes & rubber gloves
- Plastic shampoo bottles & toothbrushes
- Disposable plastic razors & make-up pots
- Plastic pens
Paid Terracycle Boxes
The paid boxes cost a few hundred pounds/dollars and are intended as one-off community recycling initiatives.
For example, if everyone in a town or village paid a pound or dollar for a box, you can then collectively gather together all the waste for that box, it’s collected and sent off to be recycled, then hopefully you never have to buy one again, as your town will be litter-free! Example boxes are for:
- Office & e-waste
- Plastic cups & straws
- Hair & beauty salon waste
- Alkaline batteries & small car parts
- Aluminium cans, pots & pans
- Art supplies & paintbrushes
- Baby gear & food pouches
- Plastic bath accessories
- Cigarette waste & chewing gum
- Nappy waste
- Garage products & glue waste
- Holiday & party decorations
- Hotel bottles & waste
- Incandescent light bulbs
- Luggage & travel tags
- Pet food packaging
- Safety equipment & PPE
- Plant pots & garden waste
- Shoes & flip-flops
- Sporting goods
- Styrofoam & office waste
- Cassette tapes
Does TerraCycle Encourage Consumerism?
Some people are critics of Terracycle, saying that by making money from communities purchasing big boxes to recycle cigarette butts and crisp packets and sweet wrappers, it’s just encouraging consumerism. That would be true if everyone tomorrow is suddenly gong to become eco-minimalists.
But let’s face it, we’re a long way off. And most of the goods they can recycle cannot be recycled anywhere else. So they will just clutter up homes, offices and garages – or languish in landfills giving off toxic gases. Or worse, get littered on the streets or thrown in the oceans.
The reason why some boxes are paid-for is because the company does need to pay to get the items recycled, if industry is not sponsoring it. It’s true that Colgate and Bic are probably ‘greenwashing’ themselves to be eco-friendly by sponsoring the free boxes.
But at end of the day, they are sponsoring them. So you can now deposit your plastic toothbrushes and ballpoint pens in boxes without cost to you, instead of them throwing them in the bin.
Co-founder Tom Szaky does seem genuine in his aim to reduce trash and pollution worldwide. The son of medical doctors, he and his family fled to Canada from their Hungarian home after the Chernobyl disaster, and grew up amid a strong conservation and environmentalist movement, and was astounded coming from a poorer background how people around him were just ‘throwing everything away’.
He actively encourages everyone to campaign for tougher laws on waste in their communities.
We need to eliminate the idea of waste. And that’s why recycling (and I say this as as recycling company) is only a temporary solution. Tom Szaky
Where to Recycled Unwanted Quality Books
Although it’s good to have a bookcase full of books, often you may end up with way too many books that you have already read, don’t want to read or perhaps don’t think they are relevant (many old books have outdated information on health or nutrition).
Some people prefer to just pulp books say that have lifestyles no longer in line with current trends (say you may have books with pate de foie gras recipes or fashion books with real fur models). So how do you recycle them – either to pass on or to safely pulp?
- Although most libraries these days buy in new books, if you have some unwanted fairly new books, your local library may well wish to take them off your hands, to put them into circulation for others to read.
- You could also donate them to local small charity shops, which can raise money from selling them, to fund animal and homeless shelters etc.
- Children’s Book Project has 300 donation points, where you can donate read children’s books, so that parents without much money have nice educational and fun books for their children to read.
- Simply Text Book is a site where you can donate unwanted and used academic books, so students don’t have to buy new. If the information is still in-date, this is a great way for students on budgets to benefit.
- Books for First Nighters is a project where you can offer comforting and uplifting books for people who are new to prison. Stuffing people away in cells for 23 hours a day is (mostly) not conducive to producing law-abiding citizens on release, so these books can help create a safer society for all.
- Bookcrossing is a nice idea. Leave a book you love in a cafe, and post online where you’ve left it. Someone else picks it up and reads it, then passes it on. Your well-thumbed novel could end up across the world, and you get to read how different people have enjoyed the book you first found in the indie bookshop!
If the books you own are too tattered to recycle (or you don’t want to pass them on due to previous politics or lifestyles etc), you can simply rip out the pages and recycle the paper, and then just bin the glued spines.
