Melissa Magee calls it "Green Fitness."
A Fusion Fitness, it's all about strengthening your heart, muscle and mind. But the workout studio at 12th and Sansom might want to add refueling the environment to the list.
"Caring for your body, caring for your environment, I feel like are very much on the same wavelength," said Gavin Mckay, owner of Fusion Fitness.
Whether they realize it or not, the dumbbell lifting, stomach crunching and cardio crazed gym lovers are giving back to the environment one bite at a time.
That's because the wrappers from energy bars eaten at Fusion Fitness are recycled and put to good use.
"It is a little surprising," said Mckay. "You don't expect that you can take something like a wrapper and turn it into something else and recycle it."
Here's how it works, once a month, the foil wrappers are bagged up, shipped out and dumped at a warehouse in Trenton, New Jersey; home to Terracycle.
Vice President of Media Relations, Albe Zakes says Terracycle literally transforms someone else's trash into a new found eco-friendly treasure.
So that makes it good garbage.
"We have almost 30 businesses in Philadelphia that have helped us collect 150,000 wrappers," Zakes said.
And companies like Fusion are keeping all that waste out of local landfills.
Back at Terracycle, a team of so called "Design Junkies" take anything from candy wrappers to drink pouches and manipulate them into marketable products.
Energy bars from Fusion Fitness are treated the same way.
Melissa Magee got a firsthand look at how the process worked.
After a little coaching from the "Design Team, a quick fold, a crease, and a Velcro snap, she made a pocket sized pouch from all of the sweat and tears at the gym.
"There are only so many resources on the planet," said Mckay. "We really need to start thinking of ways to reuse and recycle the resources we've already extracted from the planet. If not, we are going to run out of them before too long."
