How to ship and send your rubbish to TerraCycle

If you’ve signed up for one of our free national recycling programs, you’ve already taken a big step towards becoming more sustainable. Bravo!

Here at TerraCycle, we deal with the rubbish that doesn’t belong in your kerbside bin. Without a recycling solution, this rubbish inevitably ends up in landfills where it will live on for hundreds of years to come. When you look around your house, you will notice many everyday items that fall into this category. Anything from old toys to blister packs, shampoo and conditioner bottles, toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste. The list goes on and on.

The waste streams TerraCycle accepts cannot go in your kerbside bin because they each need an individual recycling solution. That’s why it’s so important to ship each waste stream separately.

To make this easier for you, we’ve laid out how to collect, ship and send your waste to TerraCycle!

Step 1) Sign up to become a TerraCycle Collector

Don’t hold back! You can sign up for as many TerraCycle programs as you like. If a program of your choice is full, you’ll be waitlisted and notified when the next available spot opens up. In the meantime, you can collect the items you wish to recycle and either drop them off at your nearest Community Collection Hub or wait until you’ve been accepted into the program.

Visit our site and make sure you go to the right page for your region in Australia or New Zealand.

Step 2) Collect and store your waste at home

Collecting and storing items for recycling is easy. Keep an old plastic or cardboard box in an accessible place in your house so you can store up items for your TerraCycle program. For instance, if you’re collecting items like beauty products, hair care products and razors, it may be useful to keep a secondary bin in your bathroom for this.

Step 3) Make sure you’ve collected enough waste to ship

Hold your horses! Before you go and send your rubbish to TerraCycle, you need to check the program page for the recommended minimum shipment. We ask you to do this because one heavy package weighing over 5kg is better for the environment than dozens of lightweight packages. Also, as a bonus, when you send over the minimum shipment limit for your program, you earn TerraCycle points, which can be redeemed and donated to a charity or organisation of your choice.

Step 4) Boxing up your rubbish

When you box up your rubbish for shipping, you need to make sure you separate the waste for each program. For instance, if you’re collecting PAW Patrol toys and L.O.L! Surprise toys, these can’t be sent together. They must be sent in two different packages, as they’re made from different materials which require a different recycling solution.

You can use any old box to pack up your waste. We recommend keeping any delivery boxes aside to be re-used for your recycling shipments.

Step 5) Print out a TerraCycle shipping label

After following the steps above, you’re now ready to request a free shipping label to post back your items for recycling. All you need to do is:

Log in to your TerraCycle account at www.terracycle.com.
Go to your profile and click the bright green button that says “Send us Your Waste”.
Scroll down and you will see the list of free recycling programs that you are currently registered for.
Find the program you wish to send in a shipment for and click on “Get Shipping Label”.
The label will then be sent to your email address as a PDF. You can then print it out and attach it to your box of recycling.
To send us your shipment, simply drop it off at your nearest post office.

To summarise:

Check the accepted waste for the program and make sure the waste you have matches.
Print out a shipping label for each recycling program you are sending in waste for.
Check that the waste in the box has the correct shipping label affixed. Our free shipping labels all look similar so we suggest printing them one at a time to avoid any mix-ups.
Send off your rubbish for recycling!

We hope this helps you understand the process of collecting and sending hard-to-recycle items to TerraCycle. If you have any more questions, please feel free to reach out to our customer service team:

Australia contact details:

Email Customer Support at: customersupport@terracycle.com.au

Website: www.terracycle.com/en-AU

Facebook: www.facebook.com/terracycleaustralia

Instagram: www.instagram.com/terracycleaus/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/terracycleaust

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/terracycle-australia-new-zealand

Do you want to add the links to the help desk/FAQs in?

Help Desk / FAQs: https://help.au.terracycle.com/hc/en-au

New Zealand contact details:

Email Customer Support at: customersupport@terracycle.co.nz

Website: www.terracycle.com/en-NZ