Local Video
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| Life after cereal for Malt-O-Meal bags |
By: SUZANNE ROOK, Managing Editor
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Posted: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 11:31 pm
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Shoppers could soon see Malt-O-Meal in places other than the cereal aisle.
A new partnership between the city’s largest employer and New Jersey-based TerraCycle will pay schools and community groups for empty MOM cereal bags, keeping them from the landfill, using them instead to make other products. Some will proudly display the famous Malt-O-Meal logo.
TerraCycle, which partners with 102 companies, including Frito Lay, Kraft Foods and Elmer’s, uses the collected materials for everything from tote bags to pencil pouches, flower pots and kites. TerraCycle calls the process upcycling and says it has saved thousands of tons of waste from going into landfills since the company was founded in 2001.
The partnership makes sense for MOM, said spokesperson Linda Fisher. MOM, which prides itself on appealing to cost-conscious consumers and using 75 percent less packaging than cereal manufacturers that box their products, allows the company to be even more Earth-friendly.
By signing up as a TerraCycle brigade, a group can earn 2 cents for every MOM cereal bag it recycles. TerraCycle pays for the brigades to ship the empty bags while Malt-O-Meal covers the cost per bag.
MOM has agreed to sponsor 1,200 brigades. And though the partnership was announced in September, about 1,000 have already signed up as MOM brigades, among them a group in Nerstrand.
Albe Zakes, TerraCycle vice president of media relations, said his company initially wanted to upcycle cereal boxes, but with plenty of avenues for their recycling, discovered a partnership more to its taste.
“It became obvious that what we should be collecting is cereal bags,” he said.
Zakes expects MOM will follow in the footsteps of his company’s other partners which quickly saw up to a million packages per month redeemed. The empty bags, he said, which are transparent in places, will most likely be used as shower curtains and tote bags.
Every TerraCycle product sold using MOM bags earns the cereal manufacturer a 5 percent licensing fee, said Zakes.
But not all the MOM bags are coming from consumers. Zakes said some come straight to TerraCycle from MOM plants — those that are damaged, misprinted or otherwise unusable.
While MOM won’t earn a penny from redirecting the rejected packaging, said Zakes, it won’t have to pay to have it hauled off either. And it will know it’s been environmentally friendly, he said.
That, said Fisher, is the key.
“When people think of Malt-O-Meal,” she said, “we want people to think a great quality cereal that saves the family money and a company that is always looking for ways to be greener.”
— Suzanne Rook is the managing editor and covers education. She can be reached at srook@northfieldnews.com or 645-1113.
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