Is there any trash TerraCycle won't take?

The New Jersey-based upcycling company has entered a partnership with Frito-Lay to turn snack bags into pencil cases and other products, eventually planning to create building materials made out of trashed bags.

TerraCycle hopes to collect 5 million Lay's, Doritos, Tostitos, Cheetos and Fritos snack bags over the next year, and will turn them into tote bags, purses and pencil cases for sale later this year at retailers like Walmart.

Frito-Lay is funding the collection and reuse of its bags, donating 2 cents per bag to charities chosen by the snack bag collection brigades.

Early next year TerraCycle plans to take a leap into the building materials market with a few new processing techniques it's developed, one of which fuses together shreds of bags, wrappers and pouches, turning them into a thick slab that can be used as tile, insulation or other study material.

"Needless to say, this new technology is going to enable TerraCycle to reuse waste on a massive scale, increasing our ability to reuse more and more non-recyclable materials," said Albe Zakes, TerraCycle's VP of media relations. "The technology also saves us time, energy and money on sorting and cleaning the post-consumer materials we collect."

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