"Human Resources," which debuts Friday on the Pivot network, will focus not on hard-partying beachgoers but on a socially conscious recycling company. The "reality docu-drama" chronicles what it is like to work at the Trenton-based company TerraCycle Inc. Founded in 2001 by then-20-year-old Princeton University student Tom Szaky, TerraCycle collects hard-to-recycle items, from potato chip bags to cigarette butts, and transforms them into colorful consumer products.

TerraCycle's New TV Show Featured on Electronic Playground.

Back in 2011, I wrote a post about TerraCycle’s ongoing quest to create what we call negative-cost marketing. In other words, we’re always looking for ways to persuade other people to pay us to tell the world about TerraCycle, rather than our having to pay them. So far, we’ve had a good bit of success doing this. We started by taking an aggressive approach to public relations. This was out of necessity, because we didn’t have the budget to advertise effectively, but then it grew to become our marketing strategy. To get consistent public relations, we learned how to tell our story. Our first product, for example, was organic fertilizer. Instead of talking about fertilizer, though, we billed ourselves as selling “worm poop in a used soda bottle.” With public relations, it’s important to go after as big an audience as possible and to make it easy for reporters to understand and write about the story you are pitching. I still remember when Guideposts Magazine, a Christian publication, and High Times, a marijuana magazine, published very similar articles about TerraCycle, proving that a good story can cross perceived boundaries. Within 10 years, TerraCycle was being written about an average of 19 times a day. In part, again, this was because we had a good story to tell. Most of the stories were about schools that enlisted in one of our free brigade programs that encourage students to collect non-recyclable waste — pens, glue sticks, juice pouches — that we would then recycle or “upcycle” into new products. Even though the marketing experts we talked to told us that we couldn’t rely on public relations alone, we managed to get more publicity every year. This outreach helped create great relationships with journalists at a variety of publications. Eventually, instead of just pitching stories, we began to offer to help create content, mainly through blog posts. We would provide high-quality, non-promotional — or perhaps modestly promotional — content on a variety of topics tailored for each publication. Before long, we were blogging for Inc. magazine, Treehugger, Industry Intelligence, Packaging Digest, and Green Child. Some sites even paid us. While the revenue wasn’t significant, the impact on our marketing and business was significant. The blogging helped build the expert profile of our top executives, leading to more speaking opportunities, more industry recognition and even to book deals and TV deals. As a result, the revenue our marketing department generates today offsets a large percentage of the costs it incurs. And every year we get closer to running a truly profitable marketing department. In our efforts to reach that goal, our dream has always been to get our own reality TV series. While our public relations efforts generate lots of opportunities to make television appearances on various shows, news programs and documentaries — including “Oprah,” “Good Morning America,” and the “Today” show — we have never had our own series. The closest we came was a four-part mini-series that appeared on the National Geographic Channel and was called “Garbage Moguls.” The mini-series was informative, and it definitely promoted TerraCycle. The concept was to show our efforts to take various streams of waste and turn them into useful products. The drama in each show would be about whether we could turn waste into a product within the allotted time. TV loves a ticking clock. In the end, however, not that many people watched the shows. This taught us an important lesson: If we really want to achieve negative-cost marketing, the content has to come first and our promotional objectives second. This is somewhat counter-intuitive and runs contrary to most traditional marketing strategies. In the following years, we kept thinking about different ways to do a show, perhaps by putting more emphasis on our people than on our process. We found an agent, we found a production company that produced a demo, and we held meetings with dozens of networks in Los Angeles and New York. We were rejected by all of them. The most frustrating part of the process was that it was very difficult to trust anything we were told by the networks and entertainment companies, which are notorious for sugar-coating. We rarely knew what people were really thinking until they stopped replying to our emails. This made the sales process hard, and we never got the kind of feedback that would have allowed us to improve our pitch. Then, about a year and a half ago, we met with a new cable network called Pivot. I had heard of Pivot through the Social Venture Network, a community of social entrepreneurs. Pivot, which targets socially minded millennials, had been introduced in 2013 by Participant Media, a global entertainment company that had backed films and documentaries like “Lincoln,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” “The Help,”  “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for Superman,” and “Food, Inc.” We were attracted by Pivot’s expanding cable distribution along with its interest in socially conscious entertainment. The company helped us rethink our concept for a show that now focuses less on TerraCycle’s mission and more on the lives and personalities of our people — and the comedy that tends to ensue in our quirky offices. We thought the tradeoff was worth it, and we ended up putting together a deal for 10 30-minute episodes. Best of all, TerraCycle does get paid — a healthy five-figure amount — although that amount is modest compared to the time and effort we have had to invest in the project. The first episode of “Human Resources” will appear Friday night at 10 E.S.T.

Tom Szaky újrahasznosított szemétből vált milliárdossá, most fikciós realytit forgat.

A new show on the Pivot network titled “Human Resources” is putting a whole new meaning to trashy television. The “reality docu-drama” will focus on Trenton, New Jersey-based recycling company TerraCycle Inc. as they recycle everything from potato chip bags to cigarette buds by turning them into colorful consumer products. The company’s founder, Tom Szaky, hopes the show will inspire millennials  to become more environmentally conscious as both citizens and entrepreneurs. “A lot of people have said the show is like a 20-something socially conscious reality version of ‘The Office,’” said Szaky. “I’m a big fan of content with a purpose; there isn’t that much TV out there like this.” Szaky, now 32, founded the company in 2001 while studying at Princeton University.  Since then the company has branched into 22 offices around the world. “The main point is to get more people to know about TerraCycle,” Szaky adds. “The second is to really inspire young people to look at becoming entrepreneurs for socially responsible reasons.” Belisa Balaban, Pivot VP of Original Programming, is excited about Terracyle’s vision for the future. “We knew they were a perfect fit for Pivot, perfectly aligned with everything we want to do, to create positive social change through entertainment,” said Balaban. “TerraCycle is an amazing company that’s doing amazing things,” she added. “It’s a funny place to spend time at, a place with great bold characters who are unique individuals and extremely passionate about what they do.” The first episode of “Human Resources” airs on Pivot on Friday, August 8th.  The network currently has plans to air 10 episodes of the show in its first season.

Dive Brief:

• A new reality TV show to be broadcast on the network Pivot will feature recycling company TerraCycle. "Human Resources" will air 10 episodes and premiers on Friday night at 10 PM.
• The program follows Tom Szaky, the owner of the company, as he navigates the inner workings of the Trenton, NJ-based office.
• Szaky said the show has mass appeal. He is working toward a goal of "eliminating the concept of waste."

Dive Insight:

TerraCycle prides itself as a recycler of difficult-to-recycle materials such as cigarette butts. In fact, he tells viewers of the show to send in their garbage and TerraCycle will recycle it free of charge. In January,Progressive Waste acquired a 19.9% interest in TerraCycle. The two companies are partnering on numerous zero-waste initiatives.

Reality television has become an integral part of Western pop culture whether or not you like it – and there are a million reasons you shouldn’t. Many of these shows highlight the glamorous lives of the outrageously wealthy, or the over-dramatized dysfunctions of the most banal D-list celebrities. For such a popular genre of television, many real-life topics pertinent to, you know, reality, are left by the wayside. Where are the shows that engage viewers about issues affecting us all, like the struggling health of our environment? For years, various television networks have tried to create successful “eco” reality programming, but none have been successful enough to make it past the first few seasons. The Lazy Environmentalist was a 2009 program that followed my good friend, Josh Dorfman, creator of sustainable furniture store Vivavi, who traveled around the country showing people easy, cheap ways to make their lives greener. His approach was simple: relate to the everyday viewer who thinks he or she doesn’t have the time to be eco-friendly. Despite his simple approach, the show was canceled after two seasons and ended its run in 2010. Many of you ought to be very familiar with the channel Planet Green, which featured 24-hour programming exclusively focused on ecology, green issues and the environment. Wa$ted, a reality series that began broadcasting on the channel in 2008, followed hosts Annabelle Gurwitch and Holter Graham as they toured the nation, confronting average households about their long-term impacts on the planet. The series had a similar approach to The Lazy Environmentalist, in that they would attempt to connect with the regular viewer by showing how even the smallest green changes can make a difference. Despite the opportunity that Wa$ted and the other eco-reality shows had to gain an audience, Planet Green was ultimately remade from the ground up in 2012 into Destination America. These pitfalls suggest that the networks, channels and reality shows themselves have failed to excite viewers. What will it take to finally engage them about environmental issues in the same ways they are engaged about the inner-workings of some celebrity’s mundane life? To start, it might require selecting the right audience. Pivot TV, a channel that specifically targets socially conscious millennials, focuses on programming that hopes to initiate discussions about urgent social and political issues applicable to all of us, including the environment. While there is obviously no absolute formula for success, a new reality TV series from TerraCycle and Pivot called “Human Resources” will hopefully be a step in the right direction. Premiering today, August 8th at 10pm ET/PT, we hope that the new series will redefine what “green reality TV” really means. The series follows the TerraCycle team as we work day-by-day to recycle and discover new solutions for the waste we are all responsible for generating. Human Resources won’t just show what goes on in the office behind closed doors; it will educate viewers on the ins-and-outs of upcycling, proper recycling techniques, and will offer various PSA’s and calls to action to engage socially conscious viewers into getting up and making a difference. Plus, it’s more than just a show about recycling – it actually presents an opportunity to recycle! Viewers can go to takepart.com/humanresources and download free shipping slips to send their waste to TerraCycle, all at no cost. Or they can request standardized recycling labels from our nonprofit partner, Recycle Across America, who will also earn 2 cents for every piece of waste viewers send to TerraCycle. Eco-reality shows have seen their fair share of losses in the reality arena, which is a shame because of how wildly popular and powerful of a platform it could be for the movement. But as the premiere for Human Resources fast approaches, we hope that it will lead to environmentally focused reality programming becoming more widely accepted by reality show audiences. Do we really need to see yet another “Housewives of Whatever” iteration, anyway?

Tom Szaky magyar származású vállalkozó, az újrahasznosított hulladékból fogyasztási cikkeket gyártó TerraCycle társaság alapító vezérigazgatója cigarettacsikk-bálákat fényképez egy raktárban, a New Jersey állambeli Trentonban 2014. augusztus 5-én. A Princeton Egyetem másodéves hallgatójaként Szaky által 2001-ben létrehozott cég nehezen újrahasznosítható termékek, pl. csipszeszacskók, cigarettacsikkek gyűjtésével és különféle fogyasztási cikkekké való feldolgozásával foglalkozik. Egy augusztus 8-án kezdődő, Emberi erőforrások című valóságshow középpontjában Szaky vállalata áll, a dokudráma-sorozat arról szól majd, milyen a TerraCycle-nál dolgozni.

Tom Szaky magyar származású vállalkozó a TerraCycle nevű gyárában az újrahasznosított hulladékból gyárt fogyasztási cikkeket a New Jersey állambeli Trentonban.