Recycling was a big topic at Sustainable Brands this year. More specifically, how brands are making money out of trash. A perfect storm of forces has coalesced to make recycled plastics more viable than they used to be, and sometimes more viable than virgin plastics. A persistently weak economy, a generation growing up with terror of environmental collapse, and the passion to do their best to prevent that, and “waste” becoming more plentiful than crude oil. William McDonough’s pioneering work in Cradle to Cradle is finally heading into the mainstream. Here are some highlights of what other companies represented at Sustainable Brands are doing to clean up the planet’s massive waste dumps: Terracycle founder Tom Szaky studied Economics at Princeton, so in his presentation he was able to give a plethora of sound economic reasons for why their take-back programs work. They began in 2001 by selling worm poop in old soda bottles. Now they have a full host of recycling programs, from special ashtrays for collecting cigarette butts to be recycled into industrial plastics, to school-based programs for collecting juice packs from children to be recycled into anything, or flip-flops into playgrounds. His presentation made it all seem limitless, the things we can do with used plastics. A company just starting out in the space was THREAD, which buys plastics from collectors in Haiti and hopes to expand their reach to other developing countries.