Global Recycling Company Expanding Headquarters in Capital City Trenton, N.J. – Mayor W. Reed Gusciora announced today the transfer of two vacant city lots on New York Ave to TerraCycle, a global waste innovation company located in 22 countries that is looking to expand its operations in the Capital City. A closing ceremony took place Aug. 30, 2021, right outside TerraCycle headquarters in Trenton. Mayor Gusciora was joined by TerraCycle Founder and CEO Tom Szaky, City Council Vice President Marge Caldwell-Wilson, Greater Trenton CEO George Sowa, and the new Trenton Director of Housing and Economic Development C. Andre Daniels. After growing rapidly during the pandemic and adding 150 jobs, TerraCycle is seeking additional space for its expanding team. As a major local employer, the City of Trenton has worked with TerraCycle to transfer two vacant lots on New York Ave adjacent to TerraCycle headquarters so it can continue to grow in the Capital City. A resolution authorizing the transaction was previously approved by City Council in September 2020. “TerraCycle has always been serious about its commitment to the Capital City, and its vision of repurposing recyclable materials worldwide speaks directly to Trenton’s industrial past,” said Mayor Gusciora. “This is one of many ways Trenton is working with its business community to help return underutilized properties to the tax rolls and promote further employment and economic activity.” “We’ve been proud to call Trenton our home for almost two decades and by working with the city and Mayor Gusciora, we look forward to continuing to do so for decades to come,” said Tom Szaky, TerraCycle Founder and CEO. “Anyone looking to locate their business in the Northeast should absolutely consider Trenton as a place to put down their roots.” “I am very excited about the expansion of this innovative Green waste management company that has a strong commitment to the City of Trenton,” said Council Vice President Caldwell-Wilson. “I hope that they can continue to expand their facility in Trenton’s North Ward. TerraCycle hires local, is committed to the community, and welcomes our artists to apply their talents on their building. These are the types of employers that we need to invest in our city.” “TerraCycle is a global leader in sustainability that remains committed to Trenton and the surrounding communities,” said George Sowa, CEO of Greater Trenton.  “TerraCycle does well by doing good and the world is a better and more sustainable place as a result.” About TerraCycle TerraCycle is an innovative waste management company with a mission to eliminate the idea of waste. Operating nationally across 21 countries, TerraCycle partners with leading consumer product companies, retailers and cities to recycle products and packages, from dirty diapers to cigarette butts, that would otherwise end up being landfilled or incinerated. In addition, TerraCycle works with manufacturers to integrate hard to recycle waste streams, such as ocean plastic, into their products and packaging. Its new division, Loop, is the first shopping system that gives consumers a way to shop for their favorite brands in durable, reusable packaging. TerraCycle has won over 200 awards for sustainability and has donated over $44 million to schools and charities since its founding more than 15 years ago and was named #10 in Fortune magazine’s list of 52 companies Changing the World. To learn more about TerraCycle or get involved in its recycling programs, please visit www.terracycle.com.

Tom Szaky, CEO and Founder of TerraCycle and Loop, articulates how multi-stakeholder partnerships are essential in driving action and innovation in the reuse space.

 

Reuse is back in a big way. Not only are stores accepting BYO shopping totes and refillable mugs again, there’s a burgeoning consumer demand for refill schemes for consumables — food & beverage, home and laundry care, cosmetics, and other products that get used up quickly. This trend towards durable packaging offers new solutions to the global waste crisis, and a new way to do business.

 

The history of single-use

 

Here, I use the term “new” somewhat loosely, as using product containers more than once was intuitive and necessary for most of civilisation, but for the last 70 years, we’ve been focused and reliant on the models of single-use and disposability for products.

 

Trace it back to mass production and material advances perfected during the first and second World Wars. Freed up in peacetime, manufacturers and plastics producers pivoted to consumers, working with brands, retailers, and marketers to create value propositions for disposability and a petrochemical material — both new concepts for the general public.

 

Single-use packaging for consumables in particular drove access to more products than ever before, giving rise to the convenience market and a throwaway culture for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) and the planned obsolescence of products once made to last (such as clothing, home appliances, and electronics) now designed to break or fall out of trend.

 

Today, the world sees the consequences of this linear economy taking resources to make products, such as packaging for FMCGs, and sending them to become waste. In the few years preceding COVID-19, the magnitude of the plastic waste crisis known to scientists and researchers for decades became a part of the public consciousness; even as the pandemic dominated global attention, awareness of environmental issues remained high and even increased.

 

Consumers now understand they pay several times for their products — for the product itself, the packaging it's in, public and private waste management programs, and loss to natural capital of the planet — while businesses have externalized these negatives for profit, and governments allow them to do so.

 

Necessary Disruption

 

A pivot to reusable packaging would be challenging, and a disruption to a business model that has so long served to create jobs, drive access to goods, and generate growth. Yet, there is a huge business case for leading the charge on demonstrating reuse models are viable, practical and capable of generating added value across the economy.

 

A multi-stakeholder partnership approach

 

Nearly all of these challenges are mitigated by the very essential ingredient that made single-use possible in the first place: multi-stakeholder partnership. The World Economic Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of Consumption looks to advance the frameworks to encourage the scalability of reuse through its Consumers Beyond Waste initiative, which brings together leading private, public and civil society sector actors committed to creating access to innovative consumption models at scale; I myself am co-chair of its steering committee on behalf of my companies TerraCycle and Loop.

 

In its first year, the coalition focused on developing a multi-stakeholder perspective on 1) the economic, environmental, and social determinants of integrated reuse systems, 2) developing a “playbook” for cities to test and enable these systems, and 3) advancing efforts to develop sets of shared guidelines for reuse in the key areas of health and safety, and design.

 

As part of this, their recent report Future of Reusable Consumption Models presents a framework for a wide reuse system, breaking down six key aspects that determine the ability of models to succeed economically and operationally: delivery-model efficiency, consumer experiences, technology advancement, regulation, cultural shift, and demonstration of improvement. All of these are indicators of scalability, and none can be achieved by working alone.

 

Thus, it cannot be emphasised enough that no one group or sector can bring reuse to life; buy-in and application is needed by manufacturers, retailers, and brands in order to drive innovation, minimize risk, demonstrate and report on value, and share learnings and resources across the value chain. Our global Loop™ model aims to do this for packaging reuse with the convenience and affordability so long driven by single-use models.

 

Loop is today in an exciting growth phase as it launches in new markets around the world (most recently Japan), and building upon the success of in-store space at Carrefour in Europe and Japan, will soon pilot at retail locations in the United States and the UK. Guests will soon be able to purchase products in durable containers and drop off their empties at participating stores.

 

Consumer confidence is key

 

Over the past couple of years we’ve learned that buy-in at retail is essential, as is the marketing and sales support for the CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands on Loop and the establishment of trust with end-users, the customers of our partners. We’ve also learned consumers take to reuse if they are confident about the safety and function of the product and don’t have to change much about their own behaviour, except for an improved experience.

 

For example, a brand-name shampoo bottle on Loop contains the same trusted formula consumers love and can be conveniently “tossed” in the same store it was purchased; through a third-party verified Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for our reuse platform, both the ecommerce and retail models respectively come out environmentally superior to alternatives in as few as three uses. Consumers gain the functional benefits of a better looking container, and the emotional and social benefits of choosing a more sustainable way to consume.

 

Challenges of cost for businesses rule the secondary challenges around lack of infrastructure, uncertainty about financial viability, and questions about how to attain adequate brand differentiation, while governments must contend with a lack of funding for public programmes and infrastructure changes that incentivise waste reduction, so proving value creation through measured ROI (i.e. environmental LCAs, consumer insights, sales lift and forecasting) is key to driving emerging models forward.

 

With the work we continue to do with Loop, our partners and vendors, and alongside the members of Consumers Beyond Waste, who include NGOs such as World Wildlife Fund, thought-leaders Closed Loop Partners and IDEO, municipal bodies such as City of Philadelphia and New York City Mayor's Office of Sustainability, and many Loop retailers including Kroger and Tesco, it’s our goal to bring reuse back, and inspire and support business in their ambitions to do the same.

By ISAAC AVILUCEA | iavilucea@trentonian.com | The Trentonian PUBLISHED: August 30, 2021 at 6:43 p.m. | UPDATED: August 30, 2021 at 8:45 p.m.   TRENTON — Tom Szaky takes the capital city’s waste and recreates. The TerraCycle chief executive officer’s company, which started out small and has now blossomed into a $25 million corporation with tentacles in 21 countries, embodies that adage about one person’s trash being another’s treasure.   Szaky’s latest project is turning two barren tracts of land, which the city transferred over to the recycling company Monday with Mayor Reed Gusciora’s stroke of a pen, into something “purposeful.”   “I try to look for value where it’s not intuitive,” Szaky told The Trentonian while giving a tour of his sprawling digs, an open-space maze of soda-bottle partitions, upcycled furniture and decor and blissfully graffitied walls. “I think Trenton’s a big metaphor of that. I think a lot of people look at Trenton and have negative thoughts. But I think that any situation, whether it’s a pile of garbage, whether it’s a city, or whatever metaphor, there’s phenomenal value, if you just twist it the right way and look at it from a different angle. And then it’s like, ‘Holy sh*t [look] how valuable it is.’”   People are looking forward to what the forward-thinking company, which originally began as a vermicomposting worm-poop fertilizer startup, comes up with on the plot of land, currently just a field of dreams, dotted with grass.   “They get to mow this now,” Gusciora joked with his feet planted in the soil. “We want TerraCycle to remain in the community.”   Council approved the transfer of the long-vacant plots at 101 and 103 New York Avenue back in September.   TerraCycle paid $2,000 for the lots, a fraction of the $10,800 accessed value of the land.   The lots were too small for development because they don’t meet minimum land requirements under the city’s zoning laws, according to the ordinance approved by council. But the plots provide enough space for the zany Szaky to do something with them. They could become a community garden or another creative space for Trenton’s artists to let loose, like they do each year on the walls of TerraCycle, which hosted its 16th annual graffiti jam over the weekend.   An outsize mural of smiling Trenton hero and two-time Tokyo Olympic gold medalist Athing Mu, created by artist Dean Innocenzi, now greets visitors outside the building.   The courtyard in the back opens up to a huge wall that looks like a green screen with TerraCyle painted across it in big, block letters.   Every wall is a canvas, no space unused and then later reused.   Part of what makes TerraCycle unique is that it’s always striving to recreate itself, like the products recycled from major corporations.   It’s the place where waste turns back into wonder.   And Szaky, a Hungarian immigrant and the only child of two medical doctors who dropped out of Princeton University as a sophomore to pursue his dream, and the people he surrounds himself with, see Picassos in almost everything.   Those include weird assemblages of wine-bottle corks, Clif bar wrappers and cigarette butts, used to create a portrait of President Abraham Lincoln that hangs in the company’s Republican Room.   Or the artist rendering of the Statue of Liberty, fashioned out of Colgate toothpaste tubes.   “I fell in love with garbage as a topic because it’s filled with all these crazy anomalies,” the 39-year-old CEO, sporting the dressed-down look of blue jeans and a blue T-shirt, said. “We live in a materialistic world, but isn’t it weird that everything we own will be the property of a garbage company? That’s crazy. And really think, everything. The floor. The shoes. The car. Everything, not just like the candy wrapper.”   Szaky left Hungary as a young boy following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.   His family bounced around for a bit as political refugees in Germany before getting asylum in Canada. He grew up and went to high school in Toronto, where he became infatuated with entrepreneurship and living out the American Dream.   When he first arrived in Newark, New Jersey, as a young college-bound student, he thought he was in the wrong place.   “I kid you not I went to the gate and said, ‘Did you misspell New York? What is Newark?’” Szaky said.   Szaky’s stay in the Ivy League, while instructive, was short-lived. He recalled being somewhat uninspired by the message his professor relayed in his intro economics class.   The lecturer asked students to ponder the purpose of business.   “The answer she was looking for was to maximize profit to shareholders,’ Szaky said. “And it felt like a very uninspired answer even though it was the way it’s defined. I wanted to try to create a business that put purpose first, whatever that purpose may be, but that it was good — that people would be happy for your existence.”   During a fall break to Montreal, Szaky noticed friends giving kitchen scraps to red worms and using their remnants to feed their plants.   Soon enough, that idea became Szaky’s obsession as he drained his savings and borrowed money from friends and family to create a worm poop conversion unit.   With the help of an investor, he rented office space on Nassau Street.   He dropped out of Princeton in 2003 to pursue his company full-time. Many thought he was “nuts” for leaving the pantheon of academia to strike out on his own.   “Totally. But I always wanted to build my own thing,” Szaky said.   As TerraCycle started to hit its groove — the worm poop fertilizer was on big-box store shelves, bringing in about $6 million in revenue and had just migrated to the bigger building it now occupies in Trenton — Szaky inverted his business model again.   “We shifted and put not the output as the hero but the input as the hero,” he said.   The company has continued to break outside of the box, with the addition of Loop, a radical way to solve the single-use waste problem that has garnered buy-in from the biggest brands in America like Haagan-Dazs and McDonald’s   “One thing he didn’t mention was they were one of Time’s most influential companies of 2021,” said George Sowa of Greater Trenton, “along with Apple and some of the other companies around the world.”   Szaky’s “fundamental waste innovation” doesn’t stop there.   He hopes in the near future to add a diagnostics to the arsenal, where air condition filters and dirty diapers are hauled off to labs and those samples used to generate reports for consumers on everything from air-quality to your child’s well-being.   “Your air condition filter has a sample of the crud in your air. Or your dirty diaper has a sample of your child’s fecal matter. And so in a year from now you’ll be able to buy services from some of the biggest brands that make those goods,” he said.

TRENTON, NJ (MERCER)–The City of Trenton and TerraCycle, a global waste innovation company located in 22 countries and headquartered in Trenton, N.J., celebrated the transfer of two vacant city lots to TerraCycle for use in expanding its operations in the Capital City this afternoon.   Mayor W. Reed Gusciora; Tom Szaky, Founder and CEO of TerraCycle; and George Sowa, Executive Director of Greater Trenton and Marge Caldwell-Wilson, North Ward Councilperson spoke at the signing.   After growing rapidly during the pandemic and adding 150 jobs, TerraCycle is seeking additional office and facility space for its expanding team. As a major local employer, the City of Trenton has worked with TerraCycle to transfer two vacant lots on New York Ave adjacent to TerraCycle headquarters so it can continue to grow in the Capital City. A resolution authorizing the transaction was previously approved by City Council.  

Mon, August 9, 2021, 10:11 AM·2 min read

Have you ever felt guilty about tossing your old Teva sandals, or Colgate toothbrush, or Etch A Sketch into the trash, where they will clog up a landfill for hundreds of years? I have good news for you. All of those items—and many more—are now recyclable thanks to TerraCycle, a company that can recycle just about anything, especially items that can’t be processed by municipal facilities.   When the company launched in 2001, eliminating waste wasn’t something the average consumer cared about, but two decades later, environmentalism has gone mainstream, and that’s been good for TerraCycle’s business. Over the past five years, TerraCycle has grown explosively thanks to partnerships with brands that pay the company to collect and recycle customers’ old products. Today, more than 500 brands have signed up, a tenfold increase from 2016. In 2020, TerraCycle generated upward of $50 million in revenue across 20 countries and grew its staff by 33% to 380 employees globally.   TerraCycle’s remarkable growth tells a larger story about the progress the world is making toward a circular economy–a more sustainable system in which companies stop extracting raw materials from the earth and instead recycle products that already exist. While brands and consumers are eager to keep things out of landfill, there are still big challenges ahead in the war on waste. Who should bear the cost of recycling? And what will it really take to recycle a complex object, like a shoe or an Etch a Sketch, back into its original form? [Photo: TerraCycle]   A WORLD WITH NO WASTE   Tom Szaky launched TerraCycle as a 19-year-old Princeton student. The company began as a humble side hustle: transforming food waste into high-quality fertilizer with the help of worms. In college, he emptied his bank account to build a “worm poop conversion unit” and spent his free time shoveling decomposing food from Princeton’s cafeterias. Two years later, he dropped out to pursue the business full-time, selling the fertilizer he created to Home Depot and Walmart.   Spending every waking hour of his twenties thinking about waste helped Szaky grasp the full extent of the global problem—long before many Americans had woken up to the crisis. He realized that food is just the tip of the iceberg: The real—and trickier—issue is plastic, a cheap, versatile material that companies use in everything from food wrappers to furniture. Since plastic does not biodegrade, it ends up in landfills and oceans, where it breaks into tiny fragments and enters the food chain.   Curbside recycling programs launched in the 1970s, but they have always been limited in the plastic products they accept; most only collect simple objects made from a single form of plastic, like takeout containers. Everything else ends up in the landfill because it’s made from multiple materials that are complex and labor-intensive to separate. A high chair, for instance, uses metal bolts and screws to connect different plastic pieces together.   As Szaky looked into the problem, he discovered that it is technically possible to recycle any of these objects. The problem is that recycling infrastructure is not set up to tackle this. Cities pay waste management companies to pick up and recycle materials, which they then sell on the commodities market. If a product is too expensive to break down, recyclers won’t make a profit on it. “We perceive that recycling companies are out there recycling whatever they can recycle out of a moral obligation,” he says. “The reality is that recycling companies are for-profit enterprises and they are only going to process what they can recycle at a profit. If an object costs more to collect and recycle than the ensuing materials are worth, they won’t do it.”   So Szaky decided he needed to create a new business model for recycling. He would build the infrastructure to recycle all kinds of objects and ask companies making these products to bear the cost of recycling them. “We asked ourselves, ‘Is there a stakeholder, like a manufacturer or a retailer or a consumer or someone who is willing to cover what it really costs to collect it and process it?'” he says. “With this business philosophy, we can unlock the ability to recycle just about everything.” [Photo: TerraCycle]   WHO SHOULD PAY FOR RECYCLING?   The idea of asking companies or individuals to pay to recycle their own waste seemed crazy two decades ago. But Szaky has observed how people around the world have begun to realize that waste has real costs.   This awareness reached a tipping point in 2018, when a video of a turtle with a straw up its nose went viral, prompting consumers to call for cities to ban straws and other single-use plastics. The following year, National Geographic devoted an issue of the magazine to the problem of plastic waste which circulated widely; brands like Everlane and Adidas began swapping out new plastic for recycled plastic in their products; and new research emerged about how microscopic pieces of plastic end up in our food and water, damaging our bodies.   [Image: courtesy Teva]Szaky first asked brands to sponsor recycling efforts in 2007, when Honest Tea, Stonyfield Farm, and Clif Bar paid Terracycle to set up collection centers for consumers to drop off used food packaging from their brands, which it would recycle. It wasn’t until 2015 that big brands created ongoing programs, like Bausch + Lomb with contact lenses and Target with baby car seats. Some turned their recycling efforts into marketing: In 2017, Right Guard and L’Oreal launched playgrounds and gyms made from recycled products with great fanfare.   This paved the way for the current moment, when many brands feel pressure to take responsibility for some of their waste—or risk alienating consumers who are highly conscious about sustainability. This is why Teva, maker of iconic outdoor sandals, proactively reached out to Terracycle to collect used shoes and transform them into new products. “There is a cost for generating waste without regard for the environment,” says Anders Bergstrom, Teva’s global GM. “It’s a stiff financial penalty that is coming on the backs of young consumers who are seeking out sustainable brands. This is a new reality that I believe many enterprises are going to face in the future. ” [Illustration: Teva] As of last week, customers can go to Teva’s website to download a free, prepaid shipping label to send their old sandals to TerraCycle. To keep the carbon footprint of this shipping low, TerraCycle uses a network of its own recycling center as well as third-party recycling plants, and sends products to the nearest facility. Bergstrom says that Teva will pay for the entire cost of shipping, sorting, and processing, but declined to say exactly how much it will come to, partly because it depends on how many customers send their shoes in. Financial documents reveal that the lion’s share of TerraCycle’s revenues come from these brand partnerships.   Szaky says that each new partnership involves developing new systems for collecting, cleaning, and separating products into their core components. Then, the materials go through the company’s existing machinery: Metals are melted, and plastics are shredded, melted, and extruded into pellets. TerraCycle then sells these recycled materials. The plastic from Teva sandals will be used to make playgrounds, athletic fields, and track ground cover. [Photo: Century]   In early April, a brand called Century became the first baby gear company to partner with TerraCycle to recycle car seats, strollers, high chairs, and play pens. Betsy Holman, manager at Newell Brands which owns Century, says the brand is specifically targeted at millennial and Gen Z parents, and initial focus groups with this demographic revealed the sustainability was a crucial factor in their buying decisions.   Holman’s team had to price the cost of recycling into the bottom line. Given how bulky and heavy the products are, paying to ship products to TerraCycle is expensive. “The cost of recycling is hitting us just like any other cost,” she says. “TerraCycle was definitely a hit to our profit and our margin is definitely not as attractive, but we felt that this was the right call for the brand. Our goal is to be the sustainable baby brand.” [Photo: TerraCycle]   THE DREAM OF CIRCULARITY   TerraCycle is growing quickly thanks to new partnerships. Nordstrom announced that starting October 1, consumers can bring in any beauty product packaging into stores to be recycled. Startups—from sneaker brand Thousand Fell to reusable silicone baggie brand Stasher—invite customers to download prepaid labels to send in their old products. Heritage conglomerate, Spin Master, which makes Etch A Sketch, Rubik’s Cube, and Hatchimals just announced customers can send in any toys it manufactures. [Photo: TerraCycle]   While Szaky is thrilled that business is picking up, he believes there’s a lot of work to do. TerraCycle has still not created a fully circular system, in which a product can be infinitely recycled into that same product. For instance, Teva sandals can’t be turned back into sandals, which means the brand will continue to rely on new materials to make their products. “The most exciting thing we’re working on is how to get the material back to where it began,” Szaky says. “This is the highest and very best use of the materials.”   This is a complicated process, as Thousand Fell is discovering. Cofounder Stuart Ahlum worked closely with Szaky to design sneakers made from just a few materials that would be easy to recycle. Over the past year, the company has begun receiving used sneakers from customers, which TerraCycle processes. But to be fully circular, Thousand Fell must collect the recycled rubber and plastic, and send them to its various suppliers. “Like most brands, we have a global supply chain, which means we have to send these recycled materials around the world,” Ahlum says. “In some cases, we have to think about whether the emissions created from shipping outweigh the benefits of creating a fully circular system.”   At just shy of 40, Szaky has come a long way from shoveling Princeton cafeteria food into a worm poop conversion unit. He’s hopeful about what he has seen over the past two decades. When he started TerraCycle, few people understood his mission. Today, values have shifted and his business is booming.   “We’re in the middle of a mass extinction and it’s entirely because we’re not paying the bill for the waste we’re creating,” he says. “We’re essentially using all of these resources on credit, expecting our children, animals, and the planet to pay for it in the future. But consumers are crying out for change, which is prompting lawmakers and companies to rethink the way we’re doing things. The future they want is circular, and they’re going to vote for it with what they buy.”   ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elizabeth Segran, Ph.D., is a senior staff writer at Fast Company. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts