I’ve called Terracycle’s other upcycled juice pouch stuff eco-fugly before — but the eco worm-poop company keeps comin’ out with new items, this time for the holidays.
Behold the Terracycle stockings and tree skirts, made with upcycled juice pouches and cookie wrappers diligently collected by Terracycle trash brigades!
Now in general, I consider both holiday stockings and tree pouches to be decorative items one saves and reuses year after year. Which makes me wonder — Even if I decided I was okay with cookie-wrapper stockings for one season, would I be able to stand looking at those things every year?
Then again, kids may actually really like this stuff (I’ve no firsthand experience and thus no clue — I’m totally guessing here) because the stockings may evoke warm memories of eating and drinking high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Yum!
Let me step back and say that I do love, in general, what Terracycle’s doing to eliminate the idea of trash. In fact, you only need to read TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky’s thoughts on the individual conundrums that non-recyclable, recyclable and biodegradable packagings all cause to know that Terracycle’s serious about its mission. About his own brigades, Tom writes: “these programs (almost 12,000 collection sites strong) are merely a drop in the ocean when compared to the many billions of used packages discarded every year.”
Other eco-conundrums posed by Terracycle’s upcycling ventures include: 1) People will come to think of nonrecyclable packaging as eco-okay since they can be upcycled — despite the fact that only a teensy amount of the stuff actually does get upcycled, and 2) The upcycled products themselves may serve as greenwashed advertisements for unhealthy, uneco products with non-recyclable packaging.
And yet, as far as stockings and tree skirts go, aren’t Terracycle’s products pretty far up on the eco-scale? Certainly since Terracycle’s goods are available via Home Depot at reasonable prices, one could make the argument that these products are the only eco-ones of their kind made accessible to the general public.
Would you buy a Terracycle stocking or tree skirt?
Images via homedepot.com
[crossposted on BlogHer]
Update, 12/8/08: Amenity makes a cuter — and more expensive — eco tree skirt.
I like that they collect energy bar wrappers, and endurance cycling events tend to be full of them. After recently learning about it I was going to try and put together a network of people collecting them instead of tossing. I want to start looking into how to make my own energy bars, but I don’t see energy bars and their difficult to recycle wrappers going away any time soon.
Comment by Gary Kavanagh — December 6, 2008 @ 9:48 am
I really like the tree skirt. I think its a very cool idea
Comment by michelle rosborough — December 7, 2008 @ 9:28 am
I like the idea of having a Terracycle bin at endurance cycling events — Shouldn’t be too hard to do, theoretically…. Maybe cycling events could even get Terracycle as a sponsor :)
Comment by Siel — December 7, 2008 @ 1:15 pm