Newton had his apple..

And I had my banana.

It's been rough trying to decide what my very first post should be. I'm doing a little back tracking since my relationship with trash really kicked into high gear 5 years ago. So I don't want this to be a blog all in the past tense, but also some of my best stories, musings and anecdotes come from that time. So just be prepared for posts to be "and today I..." as well as "in 2009 I..." because hey, this blog is really for me. It's a testament to something I truly care about/obsess over is there really a line between the two? on a regular basis and a place to throw up thoughts. Plus now I can be all cool and tell people, "I blog". It's a true win-win. So, I'm going to start from the beginning. The Big Bang version of my "Trash Girl" universe. 

Some context: I was the recycle queen in High School. The one who knew where all the blue bins around the school were, whose friends gave gifts about living a greener life or recycled out of plastic bottles when you still needed to go to a specialty gift store to find such commodities. My mission was to save the planet, and everyone gave me the necessary consumer goods to get there. 

Enter my college catalyst:

I was a freshman at Virginia Tech and despite having been rated the best college campus food in the country, was munching on an Odwalla Banana Nut bar. The bar was delicious, but it also had this symbol on the back for TerraCycle (which I had never heard of) but, being a recycling princess, was curious and looked it up. TerraCycle, in a nut shell, see what I did there, takes traditionally non-recyclable trash and finds ways to upcycle it. Upcycling, unlike recycling, finds ways to reuse materials in their current form. So this granola bar wrapper will turn into a kite, or backpack. You sign up for a brigade to collect specific products, ranging from granola wrappers to cigarette butts, Solo Cups and old pens. In return for collecting and sending them the materials, TerraCycle deposits a $0.02 donation into your account to contribute to a non-profit of your choice. I was enamored, excited, inspired, jumping up and down in my dorm room. This had possibilities to be great. 

My first TerraCycle collection box in our student center. One of a few around campus.

I got so excited about my granola bar that I kept a shoe box full of them in my dorm room I'm sure my roommate would have been thrilled had she found out... The project out grew the shoe box and skyrocketed. As an active Hillel (responsible for Jewish life on campus) student, I used them as platform for which to launch this awesome project bigger than my own collection. And, as a non-profit, Hillel collected the donations and put it towards our Service-Learning Spring Break projects. Which created a holistic system of environmental and civic action awesomeness. The rest, as they say, is history. 

All in all, when I graduated we had prevented over 20,000 items from entering the local landfill resulting in a bit over $200 towards our service trips. That contributed to the 6.8 billion units of trash TerraCycle has collected  to date. One sliver of one piece of something bigger than big.

Look for future posts on a more in depth look about TerraCycle. I'm thinking a mini series...like Planet Earth narrated by Morgan Freeman style, but Planet Trash narrated by Ellen Degeneres she'd be hysterical! I'll make a few calls...