By Laura Michaels
As it’s my second summer interning at TerraCycle®, I thought I should sign up my family for a Brigade. The easy part was picking which one. The hard part would be convincing my mom that signing up for and contributing to a Brigade would be easy to do, mainly because she isn’t the most technologically savvy person. This creates a problem because she will be in charge of the Brigade I picked.
I chose the Personal Care and Beauty Brigade®. My mom and I buy personal care and beauty products like they are going out of style. If there’s a new trend to try with makeup or hair care, we’ll try it. My dad, on the other hand, only uses the basics: soap and shampoo. I’ll be going back to school in the fall, and since my mom will be contributing the most to the Brigade because my dad doesn’t really have anything to contribute, she should be in charge of the account. My mom, however, is very reticent to sign up for anything that seems to be a hassle or is difficult to do.
To make signing up for the Brigade easy for my mom, I sat down with her and directed her where to click on the TerraCycle website. When we got to the signup page, however, I let her signup on her own. Here’s a helpful hint for people who are signing up for a Brigade for the first time: you have to sign up for TerraCycle first and then you have to sign up for the Brigade separately. As a first time TerraCycle user, I didn’t realize this.
You’re then sent to a page with a message in the left corner that asks you to join a Brigade.
After signing up, I asked my mom on a level of one to ten, one being easy and ten being difficult, how easy it was to sign up for the Brigade. She said two, but only because she had to type in her information. The only difficulty she had can be attributed to her lack of technological savvy, not actually signing up for a Brigade.
In the end, it only took about five minutes to complete the process. My mom is worried that it will take forever to send in our first shipment, but I already have used personal care and beauty products piled up in my room, ready to go in the box to TerraCycle. It’ll be a simple task to do that takes little effort and little time. And, as a bonus, my mom and I will be helping the environment and donating to a charity of our choice, which is Feeding America. What could be better than that?