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.