AHS helps Home Depot help the environment BY JENNIFER KOHLHEPP Staff Writer Hamilton Township Home Depot employees accept a plaque on Jan. 10 for collecting used soda bottles at their store for local companies to reuse for packaging their all-natural plant foods, which are sold at Home Depot and other stores. ALLENTOWN - What happens to the 30 million soda bottles that Americans waste daily? Well, 500 of them will be reused to package an all-natural plant food in part thanks to Allentown High School. A representative of the high school dropped off 200 used soda bottles at the Eco-Pallet in the Hamilton Home Depot on Route 130 for 5 cents a bottle. The school earned a total of $10 for the waste that the Trenton-based company, TerraCycle Inc., will reuse to package its plant food product. Two Princeton University students, Tom Szaky and Jon Beyer, started TerraCycle in 2002. Szaky, who is now the company's CEO, dropped out of school sophomore year to run TerraCycle full time. "We produce a line of organic plant and lawn fertilizers and are the first consumer product to be made from and packaged in waste," said Zareef Ahmed, spokesperson for TerraCycle. "Our product is made from worm poop, which is known to farmers as 'black gold' for its high nutrient content, and packaged in used soda bottles." TerraCycle has a national program called the "Bottle Brigade" in which nonprofits around the country collect bottles and the company pays them 5 cents per bottle. "We currently have over 1,700 locations collecting for us, most of which are schools and churches," Ahmed said. "The program is open to any organization and has no cost to sign up so it is risk-free and an easy way to help save the environment and earn money at the same time." Since the program garnered 500 bottles at the local Home Depot, TerraCycle donated 5 cents for each bottle that Allentown High School did not contribute to Zerofootprint. "The money for the rest of the bottles was donated to Zerofootprint, who then used the money to offset Home Depot's carbon emissions," Ahmed said. Zerofootprint is an environmental organization in Canada whose mission is to raise awareness of environmental issues and to help people and businesses lower their ecological footprint. "TerraCycle was the first company that the organization 'Zerofootprinted,' signaling that our environmental footprint was zero," Ahmed said. TerraCycle and Zerofootprint created the Eco-Pallet Program so that Home Depot could join in their continued efforts to reduce the number of soda bottles wasted every day in America. On Jan. 10, they presented the Hamilton Home Depot with a plaque, honoring the store's hard work and its commitment to helping the environment following its participation in the recent bottle collection. "Home Depot's willingness to participate in such an ecofriendly program is monumental for big-box retailers and could lead to similar programs being conducted nationwide," Ahmed said.