How to Avoid Candy Wrapper #FAIL
TerraCycle's DIY "love bracelet" design. Photo: Courtesy of TerraCycle
Two days after Valentine’s Monday you’re undoubtedly coming down off your love- and sugar-high, and no one is judging you for those candy wrappers piled up in your cubicle corner.
Plastic-coated candy wrappers have long been a recycling dilemma because of their size, weight and lack of valuable, post-life material. But even though they’re tiny in size, they’re everywhere. In fact, Americans consumed 23.8 pounds of candy per capita in 2008 alone.
When readers ask about recycling candy wrappers, we often recommend reusing them in some way (last year, one of our staffers tricked out his BMX with Starburst wrappers). We are also big fans of the upcycling geniuses at TerraCycle, who collect hard-to-recycle items to create products ranging from book bags to fire logs.
The company has partnered with Mars to collect wrappers through its Candy Wrapper Brigade, a free program that pays nonprofits to help collect candy wrappers. For each wrapper collected, Mars and TerraCycle will donate 2 cents to the charity of the donor’s choice.
This Valentine’s Day, TerraCycle capitalized on its upcycling concept by releasing instructions to make your own design from candy wrappers. Dubbed the “love bracelet,” the DIY design calls for chocolate wrappers, a glue stick, scissors, a ruler and a marker. Viola! A solution to post-V-Day candy waste served up on a silver platter.
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As of June 17th 2011 we have upgraded our comment system to use Facebook comments.
The below comments are closed and are listed for historical purposes.
Rose
posted on February 17th, 2011 at 8:08 am
I make wrapper purses from candy, pop and various other wrappers.
Claudia
posted on February 21st, 2011 at 2:24 am
Where would be the section of this website that helps you to suggest how to “REUSE” things? I have a suggestion–when I make a Napa salad with crushed ramen noodles, it used to drive me nuts trying to crush them in the ramen bag, a “Rip-loose” bag, or whatever because they were always too thin. Because I am a recycling “eccentric,” I realized that I had a clean zip-up shredded cheese bag on the counter. I never realized how thick and heavy the plastic bag was before, but I grabbed it up, squeezed the ramen noodles in there, zipped it up, and bashed away with my rubber mallet. For once, my noodles were crunched beautifully without ending up all over me, my floor, and counter! After that, it was a short leap to using my 2-foot long, zip-up frozen salmon plastic bags to throw my eggshells into for a couple of weeks, let them dry, zip it up, and bash those into molecular calcium for my plants (I could have put them into the compost, but didn’t.). Thank you for all the recycling information on this site. It has helped me go from 1large garbage can a week, to making money with my trash, and only having to pay for one medium garbage can haul a month. Thank you!