Sand Pine juicing up tech fund

The all-out effort to recycle juice pouches at Sand Pine Elementary started a year ago after second-grade teacher Holly Carter noticed an advertisement on a Capri Sun box.

A company called TerraCycle pays 2 cents for every pouch sent in. Carter wasn't sure how much juice Sand Pine students drank, but she was about to find out.

The answer: Quite a bit. In the last year, Carter and her students collected 6,390 juice pouches, earning the school $127.80 from TerraCycle.

Although it's a small piece of the pie, the money goes to help update the school's technology. Sand Pine has been adding LCD projectors, interactive whiteboards, Flip cameras and Netbooks.

"That was a need I knew our school had," Carter said. "And everybody is going green. It makes sense."

Several other schools in Pasco County and elsewhere in the Tampa Bay area also are involved in the TerraCycle program called Brigades, which pays schools and nonprofit organizations to collect non-recyclable waste that would otherwise go to the landfill.

The Pasco schools are Countryside Montessori Elementary in Land O' Lakes and Moon Lake Elementary in New Port Richey.

In addition to juice pouches, TerraCycle collects potato chip bags, cookie wrappers, candy wrappers, yogurt cups, lotion tubes and other items.

The company uses the waste material to make products such as pencil cases, tote bags, backpacks, purses and shoulder bags. In April, Walmart was selling TerraCycle products next to the original items they were made from.

Before Sand Pine launched its version of Brigades in March 2009, Carter and her students surveyed the school to find out whether students drank enough juice to make the effort worthwhile.

They determined the answer was "yes," so the students presented a proposal to Principal Ginny Yanson, who gave the nod to start the collection effort.

Then Carter's class set up a plastic container in the cafeteria where students could drop off juice pouches after they finished lunch. The cafeteria doesn't sell the juice pouches, but many students bring them with packed lunches from home.

Containers also were set up elsewhere in the school.

Emily Keeney, 9, now a third-grader, was one of the original members of Carter's Brigade and still helps out. It's her job to retrieve the container from the cafeteria after the last lunch period and bring it to Carter's classroom.

"She's very responsible about it," Carter said.

Emily isn't a juice drinker herself, though.

"I usually bring a water bottle," she said. "Sometimes I go in the cafeteria and get a chocolate milk."

Children in Sand Pine's after-school program help clean the pouches. They take out the straws and empty any juice still inside.

Emily said recycling is both fun and important.

"It helps the environment, too, so it doesn't go into landfills," she said.

Carter was thinking more about the school's technology needs than the environment when she began exploring the juice-pouch effort. Now she figures she must have had an inner hippie that the program appealed to.

"I never thought of myself as passionate about (recycling)," Carter said. "But it must have been under there somewhere."