TV Picks: Pivot’s New Docu-Series ‘Human Resources’ Spotlights Terracycle, a Global Company, and its Quirky Employees as They Recycle and Up-Cycle Common Products to Eliminate the Very Idea of Trash.
The series begins August 8 at 10pm ET/PT
What if there were a use for everything we throw away? If so, could we eliminate the idea of trash altogether?
I first learned of TerraCycle when I was pitched
YakPak TerraCycle bags for Monsters and Critics.
Years later, I finally met Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, at the recent Summer press tour for the television critics’ association (TCA) at the Beverly Hilton this past July, where he was on panel for Pivot to introduce his now award-winning international company that takes incredible amounts of anything and everything that is landfill bound – from millions of used potato chip bags to tens of millions of cigarette butts – and recycles, upcycles, or reuses all of it.
On Friday, August 8th at 10 pm ET/PT, Pivot will premiere “Human Resources,” a new kind of docu-comedy that pulls the curtain back on life at TerraCycle, one of the fastest growing green businesses in the world and whose mission is to “eliminate the idea of waste®.” Produced by Left/Right, the half-hour original series will debut as a lead-in to the second season premiere of the critically acclaimed series “Please Like Me.”
TerraCycle, widely considered to be the world leader in the collection and repurposing of non-recyclable, post-consumer waste, is run by 32-year old entrepreneur and Princeton dropout Szaky, who encourages his employees to come up with bigger and better ways of transforming what we consider “waste.”
The eclectic staff of this New Jersey-based company is very much like a family and where there is family, there are characters. The 120 employees run the gamut from science geeks and eco-passionates who take time away from their (recycled) desks to snack on kale chips and take part in office yoga, to skeptical, more straight-laced employees who work hard and provide a balance to the crazy antics that sometimes bend the rules of corporate America.
The colorful employees seen on the 10 half-hour episodes include Albe Zakes, VP of Global Marketing & Communications, who started at TerraCycle as an intern eight years ago. His gift of reading people is credited as a major reason why the company has not paid a dime for advertising under his tenure; Tiffany Threadgould, Chief Design Junkie, who spearheads themed activities in the office including “rainbow day” and “superhero sock day,” and always has her Pomeranian, Tia, in tow (and costume!); Rick Zultner, Scientist, who is a key player in making Tom’s vision’s become a reality; and Dean Innocenzi, Graphic Designer, who drops beats while tagging TerraCycle’s Headquarters.
Inspired by the series, Pivot and TerraCycle have joined forces with Recycle Across America to roll out Recycle Right!, a social action campaign focused on transforming recycling and improving the economics and prevalence of sustainable packaging and manufacturing. The campaign will feature informational videos, tips and practical solutions – such as standardized recycling labels — to help everyone recycle right and increase the amount of quality raw recycled materials available to be used by manufacturers looking to lessen their environmental footprint.
EPISODE ONE: “TALKIN’ TRASH”
Premieres Friday, August 8 at 10:00pm ET/PT
Tom and TerraCycle are close to finalizing a deal for a coffee table book of DIY upcycling ideas but the team first needs to create a sample chapter. In preparation for a meeting with the publisher, Albe asks Dean to work on being more professional.
EPISODE TWO: “FROM ZERO TO HERO”
Premieres Friday, August 15 at 10:00pm ET/PT
In an effort to expand their Zero Waste recycling program to small businesses, Rhandi and Dan work on developing a successful sales pitch strategy. While accompanying them on their pitches, Stephen stumbles upon a potential new waste stream.
Tom spoke at length at the TCAs about the show, and below are some choice excerpts to give you a better understanding of the company ethos and what you can do to get involved:
On how TerraCycle makes a profit…
TOM SZAKY: In focusing on non-recyclable waste, the reason that this bottle here is recyclable but the clothing that we’re wearing or the carpeting we’re sitting on is not is because there’s value in this material. Aluminum or PET is so valuable it covers the cost of collecting it and processing. But 80 percent of objects in the world fall on the other line of that spectrum. In other words, it costs more to collect and process than the material is worth. Dirty diapers, used hygiene products, those would be quintessential examples of that.
So we first rely on get funding from somebody. It could be a consumer product brand. We work with every major consumer product company out there. It could be municipalities. It could be even individuals paying for the service to be able to recycle non-recyclables. And that’s maybe 75 percent of our revenue. And then we convert these objects either through reuse, that would be like refurbishing a cell phone or upcycling. Tiffany, you want to stand up and show your she’s wearing a dress made from old what are those?
And then, if that’s not, then we look at recycling where we melt it, and that’s maybe 25 percent of our revenue. But both questions asked profit, so I want to just sort of hit this on the head.
One of things that I struggle with as a business person is when I talk at business schools quite often, I always ask the group what’s the purpose of business? And everyone says, well, the purpose of business obviously is profit, how much money we can make for our shareholders. And I take a slightly different twist on it. I think profit is important as an indicator of health.
Are you going to be around? And if you’re profitable, you will be around to continue what you do.
And we exist because we want to solve waste and we want to do that as big as possible. So we’re profitable and we maintain profit, but we don’t focus on it. In fact, I limit our profit to 1 percent of our revenue, and I do that by taking all the extra money that we get and reinvesting it into more R&D, coming up with more ways to recycle incredibly complex things.
And that’s how we were able to invent chewing gum recycling, cigarette recycling, dirty diaper recycling. Even next year you’ll see used fem hygiene recycling here in the U.S. in a national way. I mean, that takes real research and science, and so that’s how we work as a social business.
On how do you start doing a business like this…
TOM SZAKY: Well, we’re 11 years in. We operate in 11 countries. We just opened sorry, 26 countries. We just opened our office in Tokyo three months ago, so that’s our furthest east we go. And then we also operate in Australia, which is an amazing place to be. And we’ve had 11 years of growth. This year, about 25 million or so will be our revenue, but I don’t think that’s the most important indicator.
Revenue is just one thing to look at. But maybe another way to look at it is we have 60 million people collecting on our platform. 75 percent of American schools run a TerraCycle platform of some kind. This year we will have processed, just this year alone, 50 million kilos, or 100 million pounds, of non-recyclable waste, stuff that we could only throw out. So that’s maybe a better indicator to look at what we’ve really done. Revenue is just more how much money moves around, but it’s still not insignificant.
So your other question is how did this all start. Well, honestly, 11 years ago, when I went I was in Canada originally, going to high school there and ended up getting into Princeton. And then you had to stop worrying about high school. So my friends and I, we started growing pot in our basement, which Canada is a little more flexible with that. And as 19 year old guys, we didn’t realize how hard that was to cultivate ganja in a controlled environment with lights and all this jazz and we could never make it work until one day this was six months later, my friend who became the gardener said he had solved the plants, and it turned out he had done that by taking organic waste, feeding it to worms, and the worms would poop out worm poop and that made the plants grow incredibly well. And that was the inspiring moment.
I was really fascinated after that, with the concept of garbage because he solved his plants by taking organic waste and feeding it to worms. And suddenly the whole question of garbage really was something that was floating around in my head quite a bit.
And TerraCycle began as a company trying to come up with business models to eliminate the idea of garbage. Because if we can look at garbage positively, is there really such a thing? And then I left school and that was 11 years ago.
On making objects transformed into something that people actually use…
TOM SZAKY: TerraCycle or even the concept of recycling is not the answer to garbage. We are sort of like the pill you take when you have a headache. But the real question to reflect on is why do you have the headache to begin with.
And recycling is the response to garbage, or TerraCycle. The real question is why do we have all the garbage to begin with and we’re all the guilty parties. We buy way too much stuff. And so if you really want environmental problems to go away, we have to reflect on that as a consumer and buy very differently.
Now, directly to your point, what we used to do at the very beginning of our journey was we used to make products ourselves. And because of this question was floating around our minds, the exact one that you asked, we decided to change that model about seven years ago and we don’t make anything directly. What we do is we collect all this phenomenal amount of waste. [Our design] team thinks about how we can upcycle or reuse it.
Then we have a team of scientists who think about how we can look at the polymer science of it and how to recycle it. But then we purposely work with other companies who then take that and replace new materials in their existing objects and put them out. So like Rubber Made makes TerraCycle trash cans now.
Instead of making their trash can out of new, virgin plastic, they now make it out of potato chip bag plastic. Or Hasboro makes Mr. Potato Head now. But instead of making it out of new plastic like they used to, they integrate in our waste material that we collect. Or Tiffany just recently did her team project with Timbuk2 who makes messenger bags but now, instead of making those messenger bags from new fabric, they’re making it from old post office bags and so on and so forth.
So if we can get existing companies to shift what they do, that creates major change because it doesn’t go to the issue that you’re describing, that more shit on the market, and also removes the need of buying, of needing new materials to be taken out of the earth, which is really the number 1 environmental impact of making stuff, is the extraction of all this stuff out of the planet.
So the way the [TerraCycle] model works and maybe the best way to look at it is take Colgate. So Colgate makes toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes, but none of them are recyclable anywhere in the world.
You can’t recycle a toothpaste tube or a toothbrush, just because our system doesn’t handle that anywhere, whether it’s Australia or here. And so they fund us to be able to create a national platform where you can go to our website, TerraCycle.com, and sign up.
We give you free shipping, and you can set up your office or your school to collect oral care waste of any brand and send it to us. So we create this platform of collection. That’s one of many ways we collect. So the waste comes in. That’s how people interact with us primarily. Then we take that waste.
Our designers and our scientists look at ways how we can manipulate that waste into new things. Then we work with product companies who buy those raw materials, now not garbage but actual usable raw materials, from us and make their finished products. That’s the process.
And then that finished product could be toothpaste tubes turned into, I don’t know, like, a fork. You may not even know it was made from an old toothpaste tube. It may just say, “Hey, recycled fork made with TerraCycle” or something. And that’s sold to Walmart or Target or wherever.
And so that’s the way the platform works. And we’re out there all around the world now, trying to find more and more companies, more and more cities, more and more people, who are willing to fund the ability to recycle things that are non-recyclable. So we don’t have stores directly, and we even try not to create, you know, things, unless they’re replacing existing objects.
On the TerraCycle work environment…
TOM SZAKY: I don’t believe in a workplace that is an amusement park. We don’t have pool tables. We don’t overdo it, if you will, because some, especially, that’s sort of the quintessential if you think about it, the dot com office in the West Coast. You think, “Well, you go there to play.” And I want my employees to come, and let’s work. Let’s create real meaningful work, but then let’s create a culture that enables an idea to come from anywhere, because the good ideas don’t just come from the people with the biggest paychecks.
They come from all corners. So examples and you have to mash all this together. So one is the idea that the office is completely open. There’s no walls. You can walk into my office without an appointment, and you can just yell ideas around. And it just creates a free flow of information. The entire all the offices are made entirely out of garbage so that you live the idea. Your desk is an old door. Your dividers are old vinyl records and so on and so forth. And then you we sprinkle on these other things that just reinforce the culture, such as Nerf gunning, or there’s yoga every day, five minute fitness.
People are allowed to bring their pets to work. But why does it value to bring your pet to work? Because if you love your pet, then you’re going to feel better at work, and it’s going to make you more productive, better at what you do.
Like a good example is we instituted free lunch. And it worked out really well because what I noticed is people were going out to have lunch, and then it turned into, like, an hour and a half lunch break. The moment we brought free lunch, what did people do? They took their plate back to their desk, and they worked even more.
So you have to blend these two things together in the same aspect as in filming “Human Resources.” They’re people really want to be a part of it, so it’s a perk to be in it. It’s not something that people can say, “Oh, I spent time filming, so now I’m going to do less work because I’m here for 40 hours, and that’s all I do.”
As an example, we have this summer, just in the U.S. office, 80 interns. And I think 500 people applied for these unpaid internships. They get free lunch, but other than that and 500 people applied for 80 positions. There’s this I think when you have a purposeful business, there’s a lot of people who want to take part in it. And when you create a culture like this, it even reinforces that. And that’s why it’s so neat to be where every aspect wins.
One of the things I really loved about working with or love about working with Pivot is that what Pivot stands for and what TerraCycle stands for is really similar. I’ve never once been on a call discussing what an episode came out like and had a fundamental different point of view on it. And that’s really refreshing, because when I first I was worried about that. Honestly, when we first went into this project, I was like, “What’s going to happen when I see all the cuts and they’re pushing for one thing and we like it to go a different way?” And that’s never happened because it’s very aligned. And that is just incredibly fun. And when you get that, you double down on your productivity and your core sort of business issues, if you will.
