Man, I love a new recycling scheme! Remember how excited I got over the soft-plastic recycling bins at Coles? Well, hold onto your hats! There’s a new scheme in town!! So you’ve got your empty bottle of cleaning product or hand wash. You unscrew the bottle and put it in the recycling bin, right? But what to do with the pump or trigger? To think this over, you head to the kitchen for a coffee and end up gazing at the empty Nespresso pod in your hand. Non-recyclable, right? In a haze of eco-guilt, you stumble into the bathroom, only to discover your toothpaste and floss are empty and your toothbrush worn through. STOP! Don’t chuck all those non-recyclable items into the bin! Send them to TerraCycle to be upcycled or recycled into new products!!

While no one has an exact figure of how much waste we generate as a planet, the figure is in the billions of tonnes. Many organisations and businesses are now focusing on diverting rubbish from landfills, giving waste a new lease of life.

In my last post, I wrote about our plans to open our 22nd foreign office in Australia. We have checked the very important first few boxes in our process to conduct a successful foreign-office opening with limited risk and investment — including finding a general manager, Anna Minns, who will start drawing a salary as soon as we start invoicing. Most important, we have a few partnership deals that are close to closing.

In 2012, TerraCycle had $15 million in sales with operations in 22 countries, primarily in North and South America as well as in Europe and a little bit of the Middle East. A few months ago, we embarked on opening in our 23rd market, Australia.

RECYCLING entrepreneur Tom Szaky is stubbing out the world's cigarette problem - one butt at a time. The 30-year-old who dropped out of Princeton University to start his innovative company TerraCycle in New Jersey, said there's no such thing as rubbish, even when you're talking about the contents of ashtrays.