If you're shopping at Walmart this month and want to do your part for the environment, check out the brightly colored, eco-friendly totes and bags all made from recycled candy wrappers, juice pouches and potato chip bags by a company called Terracycle.
"Big retailers like Walmart, Target and others have been carrying Terracycle products for years, but it's been a thing here or a thing there. Now, this is 60 different products in a massive amount of shelf space," Terracycle founder Tom Szaky said.
Szaky is one of the company founders who dropped out of Princeton to pursue his dream of turning trash into treasure.
Terracycle started in 2001 making liquid fertilizer packaged in recycled soda bottles and has now expanded to hundreds of products.
This is actually just trident wrapper and weve turned it into a fabric by fusing it and then that fabric can be sewn into something like this.
"We're basically handed all types of waste streams and different materials to work with and it's a challenge just to figure out each thing what we can do with it," designer Lori Anselm said.
Terracycle pays over 40,000 schools and charities to collect and send in non-recyclable material that would otherwise go in the garbage.
Walmart is featuring an expanded line of the eco-friendly products at its 3,400 stores during April as part of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.
"Everything should be recycled , if they can do it, I think," Dottie Oldfield of Hopewell, New Jersey said.
Terracycle engineers and designers are constantly thinking of new ways to turn trash into marketable products. And while sales seem to be exploding, officials are always conscious about the company's overriding mission:
"Our goal is to basically solve every type of garbage that you can't put in your recycling box," Szaky sad.
The possibilities are endless.
Who would have thought that 1,500 drink bags could become a garbage can?
