When it comes to eco-mindedness, throwing anything away can be an anxiety riddled experience.  Every product is rigorously analyzed guaranteeing the trashcan is the only option.  In steps Tom Szaky, an innovate man with an earth changing idea, Sponsored Waste. Tom Szaky started TerraCycle in 2001 as a Princeton University freshman, with the hopes of winning the Princeton Business Plan Contest.  His idea was to address the environmental issue of trash by using worms to eat organic waste thus producing fertilizer.

TerraCycle has a more unusual model. It collects all kinds of hard-to-recycle stuff by mail — drink pouches, candy wrappers, plastic bags, wine corks, toothpaste containers — and then turns them into other things. “In 2011, you’ll see a playground made out of Capri Sun and Honest Kids drink pouches,” said Jo Opot, TerraCycle’s vice president of business development. Consumers who send trash get rewarded with donations to schools or charities, and they get the psychic satisfaction of knowing that something useful was made out of their garbage. You’d think that few people would bother to send their trash in the mail to New Jersey, Terracyle’s home base, but the company says 12 million people have participated, returning 1.8 billion items. The company gets paid by brands whose products it recovers, by manufacturers who buy its materials and by marketers who use its logo on finished products. There’s lots more about how this all works at the TerraCycle website.

TerraCycle has a more unusual model. It collects all kinds of hard-to-recycle stuff by mail — drink pouches, candy wrappers, plastic bags, wine corks, toothpaste containers — and then turns them into other things. “In 2011, you’ll see a playground made out Capri Sun and Honest Kids drink pouches,” said Jo Opot, TerraCycle’s vice president of business development. Consumers who send trash get rewarded with donations to schools or charities, and they get the psychic satisfaction of knowing that something useful was made out of their garbage. You’d think that  few people would bother to send their trash in the mail to New Jersey–Terracyle’s home base–but the company says 12 million people have participated, returning 1.8 billion items. The company gets paid by brands whose products it recovers, by manufacturers who buy its materials and by marketers who use its logo on finished products. There’s lots more about this all works at the TerraCycle website, here.

TerraCycle has a more unusual model. It collects all kinds of hard-to-recycle stuff by mail — drink pouches, candy wrappers, plastic bags, wine corks, toothpaste containers — and then turns them into other things. “In 2011, you’ll see a playground made out Capri Sun and Honest Kids drink pouches,” said Jo Opot, TerraCycle’s vice president of business development. Consumers who send trash get rewarded with donations to schools or charities, and they get the psychic satisfaction of knowing that something useful was made out of their garbage. You’d think that  few people would bother to send their trash in the mail to New Jersey–Terracyle’s home base–but the company says 12 million people have participated, returning 1.8 billion items. The company gets paid by brands whose products it recovers, by manufacturers who buy its materials and by marketers who use its logo on finished products. There’s lots more about this all works at the TerraCycle website, here.

SOUTHBOROUGH, MA, October 20 – The teachers at the Woodward Memorial School used to see a lot of Capri Sun drink pouches get thrown away.  Once they signed up to recycle them through a company called TerraCycle, the school began earning two cents for every one of those pouches and became part of a nationwide effort that has just reached an impressive milestone of keeping 50 million pouches out of landfills.  In addition, TerraCycle, which makes affordable, eco-friendly products from packaging waste, and Capri Sun have paid one million dollars to schools and non-profits in return for the recycled drink pouches.

October 20, 2010 - NORTHBOROUGH, Mass. - The Lincoln Street School PTO is continuing its Drink Pouch Brigade this year. There is a collection bin located in the cafeteria for drink pouches. The Lincoln Street School will receive $.02 in donations for all brands of drink pouches that we send in. Please ask your children to make sure that they remove the straw from their finished drink pouches and place them in the collection bins in the cafeteria.

Companies often focus on touting product innovation, but what about package innovation? It’s a big deal when Coca-Cola announces its new plant bottle, when Sun Chips announces the first totally compostable snack bag, when TerraCycle collects packaging waste to repackage its own earth-friendly products.

“We hope to wake up one day and become the new version of recycling, where every waste stream has a solution within the TerraCycle system.” It all started with worms. When fed organic waste, worm ‘tea’ is produced through their excrement. One man began to bottle this concoction into used soda bottles as a natural plant food, by taking food scraps from the disposal bin at Princeton Dining Services. That man was Tom Szaky. By the next summer, Tom met his first investor, and TerraCycle was born. As sales of the natural plant food grew, Tom began looking for new ways to reuse. His company began to take the items that nobody else wanted, cigarette butts, toothbrushes, juice cartons, expired pills and food wrappers, and explore ways or reusing anything and everything that was available. “‘We want to be the recycling solution for everything that’s not recyclable today,’ Tom says, ‘But we don’t have all the answers yet.

Tom Szaky wants to be the rag-and-bone man to the world, collecting the  rubbish no one else wants – cigarette butts, razors, expired pills and  plastic food wrappers – and turning an enormous profit by finding new uses  for it. His US-based company TerraCycle already has rubbish collecting and re­cycling  operations in six countries and expects to launch in 11 more (including  Japan, Australia and Sweden) in the next year. He launched TerraCycle in  Britain last September and in Ireland this month. 'We’re just a $40 million company at the moment,’ he says. But he plans to  become the Google of garbage. 'A billion-dollar company doesn’t seem that  big… why not!’