Tom was interviewed for the NPR show, To the Best of Our Knowledge, which airs on 61 local NPR affiliates nationwide throughout the week. You can stream or download the audio file at the link below. Tom’s interview runs from 16.00 to 30.00.

Szaky explained how he started TerraCycle in his dorm room at Princeton University, collecting waste from the campus. Tom Szaky, the recipient of the College’s 2nd Annual Award for Innovative Leadership, may be the creator and CEO of TerraCycle, a Trenton-based company pioneering an international movement to help save our planet — but he hasn’t always been the conventional role model.

As part of the "How I Made My Millions" series, CNBC.com asked the founders and CEOs of these companies to share their experience on a variety of topics. What follows is advice for starting a business even in a tough economy from TerraCycle's Tom Szaky. Recession. Depression. Just plain tough. Whatever you call the economy today, the sane among us would have you believe it’s a lousy time to start a business. Except it isn’t. I’ve been operating TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net/> in a recession-smart way since the start, and have four ways you can, too:

Tom Szaky's ambitions to turn one of America's fastest-growing private companies into a multi-billion dollar global empire didn't have glamorous beginnings. Szaky's Trenton-based TerraCycle got off the ground eight years ago out of a Princeton University student business plan contest. Szaky's idea was to establish a company that would transform biodegradable waste into high-yield fertilizer made from worm poop. Szaky, 28, drew his inspiration for the fertilizer plan from the success he and some of his Canadian high school buddies had in growing robust plants in fertilizer made from worm poop. He decided to drop out of Princeton during his sophomore year to give his full attention to the waste-into-fertilizer business he dubbed TerraCycle. Today, the company that Szaky founded in 2002 with a $20,000 machine for feeding organic waste to millions of little worms that would turn that waste into fertilizer has moved well beyond being merely a fertilizer-specialty manufacturer. It is a high-profile player in a niche corner of the recycling market known as "upcycling," in which used materials such as aluminum drink pouches, plastic soda bottles and plastic food wrappers are collected and transformed for use in new products without being broken down into their raw material components.

A company founded in 2001 by a 19-year-old Princeton University freshman is increasingly finding a home for "un-recyclable" plastics and bridging the gap between consumers of everyday items like drink pouches and the brand owners that create them. Now, Tom Szaky, a grizzled 28-year-old that was named to Inc. magazine's 30 under 30 <http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060701/coolest-startup.html>  list at 24, and his company, TerraCycle <http://www.terracycle.net/>  (Trenton, NJ), are reaching out to the plastics industry.

Upcycling is, “simply put - using those items that cannot be recycled and remaking them into reusable items,” says DiColandrea. He uses energy bar wrappers as an example of how materials can be reused when they can’t be recycled. “Its [energy bars] packaging remains very high as a waste, and recycling the packaging is not easy for some local recycling centers to do. Reusing the packaging to create another product is a simple and low-cost answer,” he added. Green Starkville has created a team for Terracycle, a company which collects materials that can be reused to manufacture new items – upcycling. For each item received, Terracycle will give $0.02 to Green Starkville, and Terracycle turns the materials into everything from clipboards, bags, and toys to fences.

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!’

If you read their story – it all boils down to the fact that this is a company that takes recycled fruit juice pouches and turns them into backpacks, cooler bags and lawn fertilizer. People are literally walking around with bags of old fruit juice packets on their backs. They take all this recycled stuff, break it down, stitch it together and make a nice little product – all at pretty reasonable prices.

TerraCycle collects waste which is normally non-recyclable, such as candy wrappers, chip bags, and juice pouches, and makes hundreds of eco-friendly products with them. This year, almost 60 of the company’s products will be sold in evert Walmart store across the US for the month of April, exposing millions of customers to these unique items, and perhaps sparking some conversations about the life cycle of products and packaging.