TerraCycle had a glimmer of a start when Tom Szaky, then a 19 year old university student, decided to drop out of school so he could build a company. His first company made “organic fertilizer from worm poop,” according to Emel Simpson, TerraCycle’s vice president of research and development. While that certainly wasn’t a recycling company, there was a re-use component since he started getting bottles from major soda companies which he used to bottle his fertilizer.