TerraCycle Part III: Speaking of Solo...

Now, not that Solo really promoted more healthy activities then consuming an exorbitant amount of junk food, it did present a unique opportunity to access a bigger student population and catapult our program to new heights.

Now I know this may come as a shock to some of you but, college kids LOVE to drink from plastic cups. Dum dum dum! Between late night get together's and football tailgate parties, Solo Cups quickly became our most profitable brigade. It also presented a whole new challenge of collecting, storing and shipping. Up until this point, we were only sending in TC boxes once a semester. However, plastic cups were bulky and therefore harder to store for long periods, and smelled like, really smelled, so we were sending boxes weekly.

Collecting took about a semester to be in full swing and had a two part system. First, when we heard of a party or tailgate we would talk to the host about setting up garbage bags or coordinate a pick up in the morning after clean up (in some instances we even offered to assist with the clean up).

Signs to advertise at parties to recycle cups

Second, after procuring gloves, heavy duty garbage bags and trash grabbers, we would walk around apartment complexes and pick up the cups from yards. It was quiet a sight, people thought we were doing community service. We scouted out the best complexes and learned the clean up schedule so we could collect before the grounds crews went out. In one case, we talked to the crew and they collected for us! The hardest part was recruiting folks to wake up on a Saturday or Sunday to come out and collect there's something relaxing about being up before everyone else and just hanging out with the Trash...

We were collecting enough cups each weekend that we were sending out shipments weekly. Luckily, my apartment had a porch that we could store/pack them up on. I'd like to take a moment to graciously thank my college roommates for allowing me to store thousands of used, stale beer filled cups on our porch for a better part of a year. Without your undying support of becoming the Trashiest Trash Girl I could possibly be, I would never have gotten to this point in my life...It is amazing what you can accomplish with heavy duty cleaning gloves a strong stomach.

Our sizable porch made it easy to store and pack the cups for shipment

The second year of the Solo Cup adventure, the project outgrew our porch and we got new neighbors who didn't feel so keen on the smell so we had to implement a new storage strategy:

Keeping the cans at the new Hillel Building made it easier for others to drop off cups, and allowed for an easier transition for the next Trashster to take over.

Like all projects, Solo Cup mania hit a few bumps. As students, it is really hard to wake up on Saturday/Sunday mornings, and even harder to recruit people to do it Sundays are a big sleep & homework day. But even so, by the time I graduated, we had collected almost 10,000 solo cups in 4 semesters. Like any good project, I think the success of our the Solo Cups in particular was due to understanding our audience and knowing what "resources" we had to work with.

Things we were collecting: cookie, candy, chip, energy bar, solo cups

Look for the last installment of the TerraCycle series: Legacy & Letting Go