You often hear the story about the young guy who gets famous with some techno business idea and you may think, darn I wish it were me. This story is so super fine and cool, you won't be green with envy, but it is green! Terracycle was founded in 2001 by a 19 year old Princeton Univ. freshman named Tom Szaky whose dream was to find a more responsible way of doing business that was not just good for the bottom line, but good for the planet and for people.

www.terracycle.net

Terracycle is an extraordinary operation that turns your “trash” into useable stuff. Send them your juice bags, for example, and they will turn them into colorful purses and pencil cases and resell them at Target or Walgreens. They’ll even donate money to your charity of choice for each item you send them.

To participate in the Candy Wrapper Brigade, for example, all you do is sign up online and you will receive prepaid postage labels and collection materials from Terracycle. Once you collect enough candy wrappers to fill a collection bag, you affix the prepaid postage label and drop it off to UPS. The program is designed for schools, universities and other non-profit organizations that get money back for each item collected.

As of this writing, Terracycle has over 8.6 million people collecting trash, are making 181 products and have donated $562,000 to charities.

Go Tom. Get Green.  ...and the planet lives on.