Taco Bell Wants Your Old Sauce Packets So They Can Be Recycled

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Taco Bell wants customers to collect its sauce packets so they can be turned into other products rather than sent to the landfill.

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Joshua Blanchard/Getty Images for Taco Bell

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«Recycling just got saucy,» Taco Bell says on its website.

It may seem frivolous to prioritize recycling sauce packets, but consider this: If everyone on the planet recycled one Taco Bell sauce packet, there’d still be another 420 million packets heading to a landfill in an average year.

To divert those packets, Taco Bell at first tried ways to collect the sauces inside its restaurants. But with most of its business now taking place via takeaway rather than in-store orders, the company is asking customers to collect the packets and ship them to TerraCycle, using free shipping labels.

When TerraCycle gets the packets, it will clean them before melting them down and molding them into a plastic that can be used to make other items.

• recycling
• Taco Bell