TL;DR: TerraCycle is an alternative recycling platform that recycles post-consumer items that are considered non-recyclable by mainstream municipal-level waste management facilities. More people need to know that TerraCycle has a huge free mail-in recycling program, through which consumers can collect and send in “trash” from Tide, Swiffer, Brita, Yankee Candle, and more. It’s all funded by the brands themselves, which means it’s free to you.
Recycling rules are often so convoluted that many people just give up on recycling altogether. Coincidentally, most recycling centers have given up for similar reasons.
Our lackadaisical efforts are evidenced by the troves of plastic waste taking over landfills, piling up on beaches, or floating in the ocean. We’ve all seen the photos or watched a documentary (my personal experience is the classic “watch A Plastic Ocean” to “learn how to recycle everything” pipeline that’s been evolving for almost a decade now). The problem is, while we have documentation that the earth isn’t a bottomless pit, we haven’t been thoroughly taught how to recycle tricky materials past straightforward paper and aluminum, or conditioned to care about creating so much trash.
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