Environmental group finds innovative way to recycle

NORMAL — Melanie Ziomek has always been an avid recycler and is so adamant about it her sister jokingly calls her “super recycling nerd.”

“I told her I was going to make her a recycling nerd cape,” said her sister, Tammy Kozicki.

Ziomek recycles everything she can at Normal's drop boxes but was concerned about all the products that can't be recycled.

“I realized how many ink cartridges my church (Word of Faith) and the company I work for (Central Illinois Grain Inspection) were going through,” Ziomek said.

She started collecting them in hopes of finding an outlet — and she finally did last fall.

It's called Terracycle, a Trenton, N.J., company founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, someone equally passionate about finding uses for items that can't be recycled.

Szaky, then a freshman at Princeton University, was bothered by the amount of food being thrown away by fellow students and started making organic fertilizer by feeding the food waste to worms, said Stacey Krauss, Terracycle public relations manager.

He needed a container to package the fertilizer, Krauss said, so he raided the university's recycling bins for used plastic bottles. His effort came to a screeching halt when university police said taking things from the bins was illegal.

Szaky then approached the city's schools and offered to pay a nominal amount for all the plastic bottles students would send his way. He called those helping “bottle brigades.”

The idea worked and Szaky was able to put the first product made from waste and packaged in waste on the market, Krauss said.

“He started to become pretty well-known in the ecology scene,” she said, and was contacted by Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, who was interested in finding a way to reuse the drink pouches used for the company's kids drinks.

Szaky discovered the pouches could be fused together to make a fabric. The fabric could then be used to make things such as backpacks, duffel bags and lunchboxes.

Honest Tea became the first corporate sponsor of the drink pouch brigade program, Krauss said. Capri Sun later became a co-sponsor.

“The drink pouch brigade is our largest and most successful,” Krauss said. “We've kept 100 million out of the landfill.”

LeRoy Elementary School is among the drink pouch brigades. Sixth-grade teacher Carly Morales suggested her students join a Terracycle brigade when the class was studying recycling. The students started with candy wrappers at Halloween, but their biggest success came when they joined the drink pouch brigade.

They've collected about 3,000 pouches, Morales said.

Terracycle accepts 50 kinds of waste, including chip bags, household cleaner packaging, hair and skin care bottles, shoes and writing instruments. The plastics are shredded, then turned into pellets that are used to make such things as garden pots, furniture and fences.

Janet Beach Davis, science lab supervisor at Heartland Community College, is also among McLean County's 18 active brigades. She started a collection of energy bar wrappers two years ago.

Terracycle provides free postage for the brigades and gives points for each item collected. The points can be converted to cash for a designated nonprofit organization. Davis chose Feeding America.

“It's not an incredible amount of money,” she said, “but it's keeping stuff out of the waste stream.”

Davis also “closed the loop” further and bought a portfolio Terracycle made from drink pouches. She's had it five years and expects it will last at least 10 more.

Meanwhile, Ziomek has raised about $150 for her church.

She's also expanded her collection to 18 brigades, including personal care and beauty products, cheese packaging, Elmer's Glue bottles, dairy tubs and toothpaste tubes. She wants to expand her program communitywide.

“I've always been conscience of the environment,” Ziomek said. “I live in it and want it to be good.”