New Jersey-based
TerraCycle has gained a well-earned reputation for turning garbage into great new products. On Saturday, August 21st,
National Geographic will feature this amazingly innovative company in their new series,
Garbage Moguls.
The show will air three segments in which it follows the team of this innovative “repurposing” industry leader - “the coolest little start-up in American” (
Inc. Magazine) - through their zany creative process to create products made completely out of trash.
BY Cristina Kinon
National Geographic Channel's "Garbage Moguls" isn't your typical New Jersey-based reality series.
Instead of peddling trashy behavior like "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" or even trashier outfits like Snooki and her gang, "Garbage Moguls" star and TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky deals with actual, literal garbage.
"There's a certain kind of irony there," Szaky tells The News. "Our show wasn't picked up because it's based in New Jersey, but it's an awesome coincidence that just as Jersey is getting big in the world of reality TV, our show is trying to make a run for it."
The BP oil spill has nothing on the hundreds of miles of garbage floating in the Atlantic Ocean and its bigger sibling, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch , a plastic-soup in the Pacific Ocean estimated to span the size of the continental U.S. Our oceans are our landfills, a fact that nags at me with every take-out container and other piece of trash I dispose of in my kitchen. I'm just one person making all this trash, and my internal-dialogue now sounds like the hitchhiker woman in Five Easy Pieces: "Pretty soon there won't be room for anyone!"
8/7c National Geographic
This new docu-reality series follows an ingenious group of eco-capitalists at TerraCycle, Inc., a green business that creates and sells products made from non-recyclable waste materials. In the opener, Pedigree challenges the TerraCycle crew to develop a line of pet products. With a strict two-week deadline, the participants quickly get to work, collecting hundreds of old dog-food bags and using them to make a variety of products, from leashes and collars to dog toys and rain gear.