Partnering with Terracycle

Several regular Mussel Rock stars came out to cleanup at the car park, along the roads and in the wilderness: Joe, Terri, Jeff, Paxton, Chris, Julie, Nick and Jane. Newbies, including a mom and her two sons visiting the area also spontaneously helped us; the mom wanted her children to learn why we pick up trash. A few others who had helped cleanup at Mussel Rock before, returned for school credits. Together, we picked up 42 lb trash, 1000 cigarette butts, and lots of picnic items (plastic forks, plastic ketchup containers, etc) from local fast food restaurants.

Recently, PBC became an official Terracycle organization that collects dirty, rigid plastic from the local environment; they provide large shipping containers with prepaid UPS shipping labels to enable us to recycle rigid plastic items picked up during our cleanups (ocean derived or land derived). Rigid plastic includes straws, lids, drink cups, margarine and butter containers, pill bottles (even marijuana bottles found at Mussel Rock, frequently), syringes, toys, buoys (thanks for Jeff and Paxton for picking up 10 buoys from the ocean, see photo), anything that has a rigid nature and is plastic or styrofoam/petroleum-based; and they need NOT be clean.

Terracycle recycles all these into plastic pellets. (By the way, we all have similar plastics in our homes, but the best way to discard these is into your blue bins.) If you are interested in using Terracycle for recycling at your school, church, etc,check out the Website: www.terracycle.com. You can earn money for collecting large numbers of Capri Sun drink containers, certain shampoo bottles, old shoes, etc. Just sign up to join a campaign for free. They keep track of what you send in, and mail you money for your organization. What a great way to keep plastic out of our oceans!!