The Kane County Carton Campaign folks want to reward residents in Kane County who are recycling their food and beverage cartons. That’s why they’re giving away $250 in grocery gift cards to someone in your town. Enter now, and take the carton recycling pledge for a chance to win.

Why should you recycle cartons — besides the chance to win $250 in groceries?

A very interesting blog post by Brian Kennell, president and CEO of United States and Canada for the Swiss-based multi-national Tetra Pak, talks about “an emergent paradigm that shows great promise” called the Circular Economy.

“The name is literal, referring to an industrial economy that goes far beyond recycling and which only creates secondary materials from primary ones,” Kennell says. “The Circular Economy is restorative by intention and based on eliminating material loss. To that end, it employs renewable energy, minimizes or eliminates toxic chemicals and avoids waste through careful design. It looks closely at how we design, make, sell, re-use and recycle products to determine how to secure the maximum value, both in use and at the end of their life.”

“Towards the Circular Economy,” a 2014 report from the World Economic Forum, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company, estimates that shifting to this model could add over $1 trillion a year to the global economy by 2025 and create 100,000 new jobs within the next five years if companies put their energies behind developing circular supply chains and increase the rate of recycling, reuse and remanufacture, Kennell says.

He also says that, while the carton packaging industry, “has been driving substantial efforts to expand carton recycling in the U.S., we need more than recycling to help ‘supply’ meet ‘demand.’ “