TerraCycle, Capri Sun™ and Honest Kids™ Drink Pouch Brigade
Every year BILLIONS of drink pouches end up in dumpsters and landfills across America. TerraCycle, Capri Sun and Honest Kids are working together to put an end to this awful loss of resources. As an eco-friendly innovator, TerraCycle is going to convert the used drink pouches into unique fashion bags, tote bags, and pencil cases for kids and adults! TerraCycle is proud to team up with the largest producer of drink pouches in the country, Capri Sun, and a young organic entry into the market, Honest Kids, to help address this problem from all angles! Together with your help we CAN make a difference!
Once you have signed up for the Drink Pouch Brigade, you will receive an activation email, once you activate your account, TerraCycle will mail out 4 prepaid collection bags to your address. Once a collection bag is filled at least 100 drink pouches please seal and drop off the filled bag at a UPS drop off location near you.
Capri Sun & Honest Kids Drink Pouch Brigade program allows almost any organization or individual to save drink pouches from taking up space in our landfills. Capri Sun and Honest Tea will donate $.02 per Capri Sun, Kool Aid and Honest Kids drink pouches and $.01 per other drink pouch you collect to the charity of your choice. If you don't have a charity currently in mind, you may choose from a list of existing charities! There are no signup fees whatsoever. To see if this program is right for you, click here for some FAQs.
CAPRI SUN and KOOL-AID are registered trademarks of Rudolf Wild GmbH & Co. and Kraft Foods Holdings, Inc., respectively, used under license.
To sign up, please click here. One to two weeks after you respond to your confirmation email, you will receive 4 collection bags that hold 100 pouches each. Please refer to the FAQs before signing up. For any questions, send an email to info@terracycle.net or call 609-393-4252 x 36.
You must follow the link in the confirmation email to activate your account.
The story... as it evolves
March 20, 2008:The Drink Pouch Brigade is well underway to being our most successful upcycling program ever, and it’s all thanks to you: our wonderful collectors! Our first round of production is wrapping up
for the drink pouch tote bags and pencil cases. Please join us as we travel to one of our manufacturers in Passaic, NJ to take a behind-the-scenes look into the making of TerraCycle pouch gear!
February 6, 2008: After a hugely successful six months the program has hit over 600 locations. Yesterday, our CEO Tom Szaky and Capri Sun Senior Brand Manager Vinay Sharma signed a three year, one million dollar sponsorship contract. Capri Sun, the largest manufacturer of drink pouches in the country, will now be the lead sponsor of this wonderful program. The goal is to sign up an additional 3,500 locations by year's end. The picture below shows Tom and Vinay as they sign the contract and officially begin a promising and exciting new partnership.
Janurary 30, 2008:The dress is all finished! V Magazine came to our factory in Trenton, NJ to do a photo shooot for their March issue. Our feelings go out to Soyeon for having to stand in the cold for over 6 hours.
December 14, 2007: The drink pouch dress is unfolding. See Nina Valenti Below sewing together over 6,000 used juice pouches.
December 03, 2007: The Drink Pouch Brigade has doubled in size since October - now at over 450 locations! Recently Soyeon Lee brought an idea to TerraCycle. What if we brought eco-fashion not just to mass market, but also to the classical music world? With her guidance TerraCycle and Honest Tea commissioned ninA vAlenti to design a ball room gown, made from over 10,000 juice pouches collected through the brigade, that Soyeon Lee would wear at her solo recital at Carnegie Hall on February 19, 2008. Tickets go on sale December 19. Last week Soyeon, Chris, Nina and Tom met to review Nina's ideas for the dress:
September 26, 2007: The Drink Pouch Brigade is really starting to take off! Thanks to everyone collecting at their schools, places of worship, and other organizations, we have 278 signups to date. Pouches are coming back to us from all over, and we've nearly collected 2,000 assorted drink pouches! Cleaning these pouches is not for the faint of heart or those with a weak stomach: each UPS bag that comes back is in desperate need of cleaning and deodorizing. We use all-natural, non-toxic cleaners and deodorizers to prepare the pouches to be manufactured into tote bags, pencil cases, and more! We've created a video, seen below, which will detail the correct way to cut and clean pouches. This is not required to participate in the program, but we do appreciate it!
Step 1: Cut the top of the pouch as close to the seam as possible.
Step 2: Rinse the pouch in hot water.
Step 3: Put pouches in UPS shipping bag, attach pre-paid shipping label, and drop off at any UPS Store location!
August 8, 2007: TerraCycle launched the drink pouch brigade as a test, allowing 100 locations the sign up. All 100 locations were filled up within the first 24 hours - 5 times faster than we anticipated. TerraCycle also brought on Chris Lynn as the director of the Honest Tea / TerraCycle drink pouch brigade to help grow and manage the program. If you wish to reach Chris with any questions his e-mail is: chris.lynn@terracycle.net. See the next installment of the story below:
July 30, 2007: Only one month after their first meeting TerraCycle and Honest Tea launched a national program to collect millions of juice pouches, educate people nation wide, and provide a way for people to reuse their used drink pouches instead of throwing them in the garbage. Please sign up and collect drink pouches so that you can be a part of this historic initiative.
June 27, 2007: Every year over 30 billion kids drink containers are thrown out in North America. A large portion of these containers are juice pouches, which are non-recyclable and are not biodegradable. In an effort to eliminate the idea of waste TerraCycle and Honest Tea wanted to find a solution to reuse as many of these juice pouches as possible. The TerraCycle team was inspired by an effort that was underway in the Philippines by the Peoples Recovery Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation (PREDA). Drink pouches in the Philippines, as in North America, are an environmental issue and litter the streets.
Beginning in September 2004, PREDA began producing, selling and shipping items made from this trash. PREDA helps at every step of the process. They train those who collect the used juice bags (including many school students who help their schools earn money by collecting juice bags on campus), paying them for their efforts and teaching them about the environment. After the collected containers are cleaned and sanitized, PREDA makes them available to the women (and men) who actually produce these handcrafted items. As of April 2006, PREDA had sold over 46,500 bags worldwide, worth over $108,000 US Dollars!
In an effort to come up with a similar solution in North America, on June 27th, 2007, the TerraCycle team met with Honest Tea at their headquarters in Bethesda. They unveiled a bag that was made entirely from North American used drink pouches. See a clip from that meeting below:
The team at Honest Tea was extremely excited to ally with TerraCycle and build a program where people across America could reuse drink pouches.
We would like to acknowledge Ann Wizer and the XS Project for their wonderful idea.
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According...
Company Turns Trash
Into Totes, Backpacks
And Other Products
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