The program, called “The Great Recycle,” launched with a 30-foot recycling bin to show support for the city’s pledge to double recycling efforts.
Honest Tea chose New York as the pilot location for The Great Recycle to aid Mayor Bloomberg’s pledge to double recycling in New York City by 2017. As part of The Great Recycle, Honest Tea and partners GrowNYC, RecycleBank, Coca-Cola Live Positively, Global Inheritance and Five-Boro Recycling are turning all of the bottles collected in Times Square into gardening materials, such as plastic lumber, watering cans, and fertilizer containers. Those materials will then be used to build an urban garden for a NYC public school.
The Great Recycle team offered t-shirts, hats, and garden-related items as rewards to people who recycled bottles, and showed off a sample urban garden to display what the recycled bottles will build.
“National recycling rates are nowhere near where they need to be,” says Honest Tea co-founder and TeaEO Seth Goldman. “Honest Tea is committed to finding ways to help Americans recycle more. We’ve helped install recycling bins in our hometown of Bethesda, MD and now it’s time to expand our efforts.”
The project continues on at TheGreatRecycle.com, where visitors can make a recycling pledge and earn rewards with Recyclebank point, which can be redeemed for discounts and deals from more than 3,000 local and national businesses.
Honest Tea is the nation’s top-selling organic bottled tea company, with all tea varieties certified Fair Trade. Through a partnership with TerraCycle, they have upcycled nearly one million drink pouches from their Honest Kids line, turning them into pencil cases, book bags, and notebooks. In partnership with Bethesda Green and Coca-Cola, they installed 33 recycling bins in Bethesda, MD, and collected more than 4,000 lbs of containers in the first year.