Drink Pouches Saved From Landfill

The Drink Pouch Brigade, a Terracycle program encourages people to collect their used drink pouches. “Every year over 30 billion kids drink containers are thrown out in North America. A large portion of these containers are juice pouches” You send 100 empty pouches at a time back to the company, which makes a charitable donation of 2 cents per Honest Kids branded pouch, and 1 cent per competitor. After the pouches are cleaned they are used as the raw materials for bags of various sizes that will ultimately be available for purchase.

Could you imagine the impact if elementary schools across America participated in this program? TerraCycle would be swimming in drink pouches.

I read  The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken at least 5 years ago, but my discover of TerraCycle reminded me of what an inspirational book it is. He discusses the future of green business and how some of the most innovative startups in the 90s looked to create new goods from waste products. Company A starts with raw materials to create a product, leaving behind waste products. Company B finds a way to monetize on those waste products, creating another product, leaving behind a different set of waste products. And so on and so forth. TerraCycle fits into this system wonderfully, creating something new from items we previously deemed disposable.

Ecoist is another great company that works on the same principle. They take misprints and otherwise unusable wrappers from Luna Bar, candy, and gum companies to turn them into stylish accessories. When you buy the products you’ve managed to save a lot of plastic from falling into landfill, and you’ve got a bag or wallet your friends will envy!

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