Positively impacting people, communities, and the environment

Our Mission

The TerraCycle Foundation

The TerraCycle Foundation’s mission is to reduce the flow of plastic waste from rivers and canals before it can reach the ocean. In close partnership with local communities, we design world-class river waste prevention, collection and recycling solutions in regions of the world suffering from heavily polluted waterways.

With your support

2,864,814 lbs

of waste have been removed from our rivers and waterways

Our Solution

Our approach addresses the complex factors that contribute to the increasing rates of plastics pollution.

CLEAN UP WATERWAYS

The Foundation partners with local communities to build, adapt, maintain, and service marine trash capture technology.

CREATE LOCAL JOBS

The Foundation works with local waste pickers to improve collection rates by providing fair wages, tools, supplies, financial literacy, education, care for children, and health and safety training.

ENGAGE LOCAL COMMUNITIES

The Foundation engages local district governments and organizations to ensure the long term stability and maintenance of the collection programs.

PROCESS WASTE

Together with our network of partners, the Foundation identifies innovative recycling solutions and end-markets in which to sell the collected materials.

All in a Day's Work

How do we get waste from rivers all the way to recycling? It starts with our river traps. Once waste is collected from the traps, crews bring it to the sorting center, where they unload, weigh, sort, and bale it. This process enables us to keep careful track of how much trash we are pulling from each location.

We track meticulously to ensure that we are meeting our goals and capturing as much waste as we can. You can feel confident supporting our work because you know the process behind our claims.

1: One of our River Traps full of collected waste

2: The crew emptying waste collected by the River Trap

3: Returning to the sorting center with a boat full of collected waste

4: Unloading the collected waste from the boat at the sorting center dock

5: Weighing the waste collected

6: Tracking the weight and locations where waste was collected

7: Sorting the waste by type

8: Our team posing with baled plastic ready for processing

100% of collected waste is diverted from entering our marine ecosystem.

Closing the loop

We pull a wide range of waste from waterways (everything from toys to motorcycle helmets!) We recycle as much as we can locally—between 19-25% of the waste collected. We convert the rest to energy locally to ensure that it doesn’t end up back in the river system.

Our products not only give trash new life and keep it from polluting our oceans, but they also fund our work. 100% of our proceeds go back to cleaning up waterways.

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Recovering Waste & Plastic is just the Beginning

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Working with local communities to change behaviors

The TerraCycle Foundation partners with local communities, schools, universities, and religious organizations to raise community awareness about the impacts of poor waste management.

Our outreach programs not only give people a chance to participate directly in Canal Cleanups, but they also teach them how to reduce their own plastic waste footprint and encourage them to set up or improve recycling in their home, schools, workplace, and community. This is a more sustainable approach to waste management and recycling that directly involves communities in becoming part of the solution.

PARTNERSHIPS

Working together for greater impact

The TerraCycle Foundation partners with local businesses and governments to join us in our river waste prevention, collection, and recycling of river waste.

Companies that support the Foundation's work can earn plastic offsets and carbon offsets to support their sustainability goals.

Learn more about partnership opportunities as well as our corporate matching program HERE.

GOVERNMENT PARTNERSHIPS

Private public partnerships

The TerraCycle Foundation has built strong partnerships with the Thai government at both the local and a regional level. The support of various Thai governmental departments have been instrumental in moving the project forward and creating strong public/private partnerships.

RIVER WASTE COLLECTION

How we solve the Ocean Plastic Challenge by working upstream

Since July 2020, when we deployed three river plastic traps in the heavily-polluted Lat Phrao Canal in Bangkok, the TerraCycle Foundation has been diverting approximately 11,000 pounds of waste per week.

By implementing our highly effective river plastic traps upstream we are able to achieve a high level of impact in a variety of areas.
A) The waste has not had a chance to be broken down into micro plastics, so we are able to collect more.
B) The waste is less degraded, and is more likely to be recycled.
C) Leaching chemicals and other pollutants in the plastic or contained by it are removed before they can enter the environment.
D) The collections are more visible to the communities, and so they are more aware of the impacts of poor waste management, and we give them direct opportunities to manage their waste more effectively.

By targeting waste upstream we are able to collect it before it degrades and is broken into micro plastics. This ensures a higher rate of recyclability, and dramatically reduces micro plastics, and other chemicals from ever entering the ocean.