The demands on daycares cannot be overstated. Families need to find ways to care for little ones while they work, and childcare facilities across the country provide support in a year full of challenges. Caregivers and parents around the world preserve and protect future generations, and shape their world in more ways than one.
Take Southeast Baptist Preschool and Daycare in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The Monday through Friday nonprofit childcare center accepts children ranging from six weeks to five years in age at 13 to 99 at a time, offering seven classes of “supervised instruction that is geared to the age, physical, mental, and emotional development of each child.”
Once a week, the children are served Mini Muffins from Entenmann’s Little Bites®, which come in easy, on-the-go snack pouches. The snack pouches are nationally recyclable through the brand’s TerraCycle® program, a free, national recycling program created to ensure the snacks can be enjoyed with an easy way to keep the pouches out of landfills and the environment.
The daycare’s cook collects the packages after the children eat so that twice a year, the director of Southeast Baptist Preschool and Daycare Debra “Ms. Debbie” Henegar can mail in the collections, often in several boxes at a time! With such volumes, the facility racks up TerraCycle Points, which they are able to redeem to buy items for the classrooms.
Little by little becomes a lot, and the daycare is a perfect example of what happens when individuals recycle to help the planet and keep trash out of landfills. To date, Southeast Baptist Preschool and Daycare has shipped us approximately 5,000 Little Bites snacks pouches for recycling, contributing to a total milestone of nearly 6.5 MILLLION for the program!
How did this come to be? Ms. Debbie tells the story. “I am a retired kindergarten teacher. After teaching kindergarten, I accepted a job teaching preschool. We had a recycling box for ink and I was looking for other things we could recycle. That is when I discovered the TerraCycle website.”
When she left the job and went to work as a director of Southeast Baptist Preschool and Daycare Center, Ms. Debbie went back to our page to see what could be set up at the center to get the children involved.
That was back in 2017, and today, the daycare is a top collector of snack pouches and uses the free program as a fundraising opportunity. “The money we earn goes to buy items for the classrooms so the children see us collecting the packages, recycling them, and using the money for items the children can use.”
Why participate in recycling, now or ever? “This is a wonderful program if someone is looking for a great way to incorporate recycling and help children participate. Our children have gotten a better understanding of reusing items and how it helps the environment…We teach our children to help our planet.”
Thanks to collectors like Southeast Baptist Preschool and Daycare, the Entenmann’s Little Bites® Pouch Recycling Program has not only saved pouches from landfills, but donated more than $95,000 to schools and charities, and still counting!
The program continues to collect from individuals, schools, businesses and community organizations interested in recycling the non-recyclable, fundraising for charity, and protecting a cleaner, brighter future for children.
Join the movement and learn more about the Entenmann’s Little Bites® Pouch Recycling Program here.