Be a part of the effort to reduce, reuse and recycle with YoGro, and earn money for your favorite school or nonprofit organization at the same time.
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YORK COUNTY - Organic food company Stonyfield Farm is partnering with TerraCycle in a pilot recycling program aimed at collecting used yogurt containers and reusing them as YoGro!TM planting pots.
TerraCycle's pilot Yogurt Brigade will include schools, community groups and others collecting 6 and 32 oz yogurt containers. For every container collected, Stonyfield will donate 2 cents or 5 cents, respectively, to a charitable organization or the school of the collector's choice.
Once schools, nonprofits and others are enrolled in the program, TerraCycle will provide prepaid UPS shipping boxes to consumers, who fill the boxes with clean yogurt containers and return them to TerraCycle at no cost. TerraCycle will then clean the containers and work with inner-city artists to hand paint each container, making them into attractive, modern planting pots that TerraCycle will then sell to large retailers that currently use black plastic planting pots - millions of which are discarded by consumers every year.
To sign up your school, charity or even your office, visit www.terracycle.net/brigades.
"We are always looking for ways to help our consumers who want to recycle or reuse our cups, but have few or no options to do so," noted Stonyfield Farm President and CEO Gary Hirshberg in an announcement of the effort.
Stonyfield Farm's yogurt cups are made from polypropylene plastic #5. A study by the Center for Sustainable Systems determined that #5 was the most environmentally preferable choice of plastics available for Stonyfield Farm yogurt because it allows for the cups to use a minimal amount of plastic. However, since many recycling centers are not equipped to handle #5 cups, Stonyfield Farm has teamed with TerraCycle, which currently runs a nationwide recycling program collecting used soda bottles.
"The environmental mantra is reduce-reuse-recycle," Hirshberg noted. "We've reduced by using #5, and this project offers an opportunity to reuse some of our yogurt cups."
The program is part of TerraCycle's Sponsored Waste movement, in which socially and environmentally responsible companies and brands provide funding for TerraCycle to collect and reuse their packaging, such as bottles, yogurt containers, drink pouches and bar wrappers.
TerraCycle was founded by Tom Szaky, a 25-year-old entrepreneur and Princeton University dropout. TerraCycle Plant FoodTM and TerraCycle's other products are the first consumer product to earn the right to carry the ZerofootprintTM seal, which signifies that the materials and manufacturing process used have virtually no negative environmental repercussions.
