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School Turns Trash Into Cash

Published October 24, 2011 at 4:58 AM PDT

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Ari Shapiro.

An empty juice box may only be worth a couple of cents, but for 20,000 of them, you can get a nice chunk of change and a messenger bag. A school in Flint, Michigan gathered tens of thousands of potato chip bags, juice boxes and other lunchtime trash. They made almost $500 selling the trash to a company called Terracycle, which turns the junk into backpacks made of Skittles wrappers and placemats made from Cheetos bags. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.