Morris Township’s Woodland School wins $10K in TerraCycle recycling contest

What do you do with $10,000 in prize money?

If you’re the Green Team from Morristown’s Woodland School, you might erect a monument  from recycled drink pouches, Ziploc bags and Elmer’s Glue Sticks.

Parents and kids at the K-2 school finished fifth in a statewide recycling contest sponsored by TerraCycle, a company started by a Princeton University dropout who sold organic “worm poop” fertilizer in used soda bottles and then branched out to make lunch bags, fences and other products from hard-to-recycle materials.

Between October and December, Woodland’s Green Team collected nearly 35,000 items, which at 2 cents apiece netted more than $715 for the group, in addition to the Trash for Cash contest prize.

“Our goal on the Green Team was to promote environmental awareness,” said Christine Volinsky, a Morris Township resident who co-founded the 10-mom group with Suzie Vail, another parent of  Woodland students. “We got swept away by the contest.”

Kids at the school were asked to sort their lunch refuse into bins in the cafeteria. Parents sorted all this into 53 boxes for shipments to TerraCycle in Trenton.

A Brownie troop from the Thomas Jefferson School briefly helped with the sorting. “They thought it was disgusting and wouldn’t do it again,” Christine said with a laugh.

The money was a bonus, said Suzie, a former journalist whose children Sean and Sophia attend Woodland.

“We wanted kids to really think about recycling materials, and that you can re-use things so they don’t end up in a landfill,” she said.

Suzie wanted to start a Green Team to enhance Woodland’s recycling program; she said school Principal David Gidich gave his enthusiastic support.

“We all worked together to get to this point, which is why it works,” Suzie said.

Mothers joined forces to help kids collect drink pouches by Capri Sun and Honest Kids; Ziploc and other brands of baggies and containers; cell phones and inkjet cartridges (each worth 25 cents apiece); gum packaging, Elmer’s Glue Sticks and Lunchables lunch kits, said Christine, whose kindergartener, Kezia, quickly caught on and began reminding her teacher to recycle.

TerraCycle partners with major brands to create products from packaging that otherwise might pose a public relations problem for them.

The company was founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old freshman at Princeton.

When his worm fertilizer idea only finished fourth in the Princeton Business Plan Contest, he left school to develop the concept and won a $1 million competition. He turned down the money to retain control of the company.

TerraCycle now operates from a Trenton headquarters decorated by graffiti artists. The company has turned nearly 2 billion pieces of trash into a line of 246 recycled and “upcycled” products sold by the likes of Walmart and Whole Foods Market. More than $1.6 million has been generated for schools and charities. On Earth Day 2009, Tom Szaky published Revolution in a Bottle: How TerraCycle is Redefining Green Business.

Christine, an amateur beekeeper and founder of a company called Scented Journeys, heard about TerraCycle a few years ago when she served on the board of Habit for Humanity. Suzie got wind of the Trash for Cash program from a Capri Sun box in her recycling pile, and mentioned it when they were establishing the Green Team last spring.

Recycling continues at Woodland as the Green Team ponders the happy problem of how to spend $10,715.

The Ziploc sculpture probably won’t happen. But the ladies would like to see some sort of lasting reminder about the power of recycling.

“Maybe a garden, or a composting program,” said Christine. “Or maybe an Earth Day celebration.”