At a time when education funding is drying up, some schools are finding cash in their trash.
For several years now, school districts around Michigan and around the nation have been turning their waste streams into a revenue stream through a cooperative program with TerraCycle, a Trenton, N.J. firm that buys discarded juice pouches, potato chip bags, plastic cups and other typical lunchroom debris.
Schools from Marquette to the Thumb to Flint, Kalamazoo, Carleton and Monroe have been paid 2 cents an item, which might seem paltry but, on a volume basis, can make a school several hundred dollars a year by shipping their trash to the firm. Even some large commercial concerns such as Michigan International Speedway and Kroger collect trash to send to TerraCycle.
In a process it calls "upcycling," the company converts the waste into a range of products and materials — everything from purses to coolers to pencil cases to notebooks to plastic lumber and pavers.
With more than 25 million people collecting waste in 18 countries TerraCycle has diverted billions of units of waste and used them to create more than 1,500 different products available at major retailers ranging from Walmart to Whole Foods Market.
The staff works from a headquarters office made entirely of recycled materials.
The business was founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old Princeton University freshman. He began it by packaging liquid worm poop in used soda bottles and marketing it as organic fertilizer. He ended up selling about 100,000 units to Walmart.
Today, the company has "brigades" of trash collectors across the country and around the globe, and it has a system that allows them to ship the stuff to New Jersey postage-paid. In Michigan alone, nearly 200 schools and other organizations gather and ship trash to the company, including some Scouting groups and institutions as large as Central Michigan University.
For schools or classrooms, the proceeds can pay for a field trip, a computer or other item without necessarily hitting up the school board for cash.
In the Monroe region, Triumph Academy and Waterloo, Arborwood, Manor and Sterling Elementary Schools are involved with TerraCycle.
Kim Pearch runs the 10-member "Green Team" of second- through sixth-graders at Waterloo, which scours the school for drink pouches, candy wrappers and chip bags. The team began four years ago recycling water bottles and came across the TerraCycle program at a county Earth Day fair.
In three years working with TerraCycle, the team has collected more than 25,000 drink pouches and earned about $340. It also recycles Papermate pens, dry erase markers, Elmer's Glue bottles and sticks, candy wrappers and chip bags.
The money is used for further recycling initiatives, such as purchasing items to promote recycling among others, or is donated to charities.
"They enjoy doing it and they're amazed at how much we've recycled," Ms. Pearch said. "I keep telling them, it's their future. We need to work on saving the resources we have here. It's about taking care of the earth and being responsible."
She said the initiative has benefits that provide lessons beyond recycling because the sorting, counting and collecting involves science, social studies, math and reading. "Kids will go out on the playground now and are quick to pick up things knowing that more than likely they can be recycled somehow," she said.
Stacy Nunn, a volunteer and PTO president at Sterling Elementary School in Carleton, said her school has been recycling with TerraCycle for about two years now, concentrating on plastic drink pouches. The school has recycled thousands of the pouches, she said, and the account balance with TerraCycle currently is about $34.
None of the money from recycling is earmarked for any single specific purpose, she said. "This is through the PTO, so we use it for our PTO projects, and that goes to a variety of places."
She said the students support the program not only for its recycling, but because she also makes lunch totes and other items from stitching the pouches together, much in the manner that TerraCycle makes the products from recycled materials that are sold on its Web site. "They like to recycle, but they like that you can come up with something fun out of trash," she said of the children.
The trash sent to TerraCycle can earn points redeemable for gifts, cash or a donation to a charitable group.
"You might think that there's not a lot of benefit because you're just one person or one classroom," said TerraCycle spokeswoman Lauren Taylor. "But multiply that by everybody that's participating, you can really make a difference."