TerraCycle Part IV: Legacy & Letting Go

I'm back! Did ya miss me? Still settling in to ma new digs and West Coast life- a whole new city of Trash to explore! Been here about a month, but I'm back from the hiatus! As promised, here is the last installment of the TerraCycle series! 

All good things must come to an end, even a fabulously witty blog post series such as this one. College also must eventually come to an end, for most of us at least. With the daunting feeling of "Life After College" approaching, I knew I would have to decide what would become of "my baby."

In college, it's hard to think of the long game when the experience has a deadline. After TerraCycle really started becoming successful and my ego was sufficiently stroked as to how well it was going, I started making plans to set it in motion for success after my graduation. For one, the norming process I talk about in Part I, never stops. New people enter college every year and a successful program sufficiently ushers them into the culture you've created. One way we did this was by this really cool commercial that was made for the campus TV Station. But it's also about leadership. I didn't want to just hand the job onto the next Hillel person who was there, I wanted them to want to own the project even if they weren't as invested in Trash as I was and let's face it, no one was going to be as into Trash as I was. 

But I was surprised at how the mini army had taken ownership of the project and even though TerraCycle was "my baby," it was their baby too. People who had been elbow deep in it with me from the beginning were just as invested as I was in the mission and impact the program was having. Programs are only as strong as the people in them and that is exactly who I was leaving TerraCycle in the hands of. (Now I heard whispers that the program got dropped a little, as expected. But I met the current girl from Hillel who is heading the project and it seems to be in good hands). 

Implementing a successful program is hard. Letting go is harder. But any program is only as successful as the people in it. All the trash warriors and partnerships we created are the reason I left TerraCycle at Virginia Tech feeling like I did something that worked. Now, like any project, I always feel like I could have done more, but after writing this series, I realize how much was done, by students, in such a short time. Hashtag Satisfied. 

By the time I graduated, we had diverted over 20,000 items from the landfill in three and a half years, resulting in about $200 raised for our service trip to New Orleans. Not too shabby for a project inspired by a banana bar.


Things we were collecting: cookie, candy, & energy bar wrappers, chip bags, solo cups, dairy containers

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

Sadly Solo

You know you have a trash problem when your friends send you things like this on a regular basis...

Look out in the next week for the first in a series of blog posts on how we diverted over 10,000 solo cups from a landfill!