I joined a free recycling program—now what?
Thank you for starting your recycling journey with TerraCycle®! So, you’ve made an account and joined a free recycling program—now what? First, let’s start with the basics…
What is a free recycling program, and why is it free?
Our free recycling programs are recycling solutions for your commonly-used, hard-to-recycle trash like toys, beauty empties, oral care packaging, and more. In these programs, you collect your hard-to-recycle trash and send it back to TerraCycle, where we recycle it. We work with retailers and other stakeholders who fund the recycling process, making them free for you to use.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let's dive into what to do after joining a free recycling program.
Start collecting your trash
That’s right! You’re set to start collecting the hard-to-recycle trash of the free recycling program you joined as soon as you’ve signed up. Make sure to read the details of what is accepted in the program you signed up for—they’ll be on the same page you used to join.
You don’t need to clean the excess product out of the items you plan on sending back to us, but please try to use as much of the product as possible. And make sure the trash you send in is dry, as UPS won’t accept dripping packages.
Use any box that is fit for shipping to collect your trash. To be the most environmentally efficient, please try to completely fill up a box with your hard-to-recycle trash before mailing it back to us.
How to get your free shipping label
Once your box of trash is full and you’re ready to ship it back to TerraCycle, you’re going to need a shipping label. The good news is that we provide that shipping label for free! All you have to do is print it out and adhere it to your box. Follow these steps to find your free shipping label…
- Go to your account profile on our website.
- Find the program you want to ship in under “My programs.”
- Click “Get shipping label.”
Once you complete these steps, your shipping label will be sent to the email address associated with your account. If you can’t find it, please check your spam folder.
Once the shipping label is affixed to your box, you’re ready to send your trash back to TerraCycle for recycling! Let’s take a look at what happens after we receive your hard-to-recycle trash.
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Regulatory review - We complete an extensive assessment of the materials we are planning to receive and recycle, taking into account factors like material composition, real-world factors like contamination, and local, regional, and national regulations.
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Receipt and check-in - Shipments of waste are sent to one of our local TerraCycle Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) where we scan it to record the shipment information, date, weight, and what material it contains.
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Sortation and aggregation - We sort materials based on material characteristics and composition in order to route material downstream for proper processing and handling.
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Cleaning and processing - The different material types are cleaned and then sent to third-party partners to process the materials into usable forms.
Watch this video to see our recycling process in action.
The carbon footprint of shipping
TerraCyclers often question the environmental costs of transporting trash to our MRFs. We understand your concerns, which is why we have an internal Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) department that conducts LCAs to measure the environmental benefits of our recycling programs.
An LCA calculated that TerraCycle’s recycling models outperform municipal waste management options in the US by an average of 45% across eight key impact categories.
We took into account the weight of shipments and the total distance a box travels to ensure the findings apply to a country as large as the US. Even increasing the distance a box traveled by three times still resulted in a 20 to 30% benefit over landfill and incineration options in any impact category. We also found that a 90% reduction in weight per shipment had less than a 5% impact on any category.
Need some help?
Visit the TerraCycle Help Center or contact our Customer Care team at customercare@terracycle.com or +1 (866) 846-7786, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.